Colorado firm brings age-old technology into the 21st Century to help forests, farms and emissions

This piece from TWW’s Greg Brophy first ran in The Fence Post on November 17, 2023 and can be accessed here.

Colorado firm brings age-old technology into the 21st Century to help forests, farms and emissions

By Greg Brophy

If there was a single technology that could reduce wildfire risk, improve the health and productivity of farmland, and keep carbon emissions out of the atmosphere, would you want to see that technology succeed?

If the answer is yes, then you may also be interested to know that a leading developer of this technology is based right here in Colorado, yet another example of our state’s leadership on energy and environmental issues.

The technology in question is biochar, which is created when wood and other organic materials are superheated in an oxygen-limited environment. Instead of burning and releasing carbon dioxide, which happens at lower temperatures, a chemical reaction called pyrolysis converts the carbon in the wood directly into biochar, a charcoal-like substance with very high carbon content.

Once converted into biochar, the carbon from dead trees, construction waste and other sources of timber is locked in place — it won’t be released into the atmosphere through burning or through decomposition.

Instead, that carbon can be mixed into farmland soils to help with water retention, the exchange of nutrients between crops and the soil, and improving the overall soil structure. “Biochar has many properties that have potential to enhance soil fertility,” according to the Colorado State University Extension Service.

The highly concentrated carbon in biochar can also be used by industry in a range of products, including plastics and road asphalt. And every ton of carbon that’s stored in biochar prevents more than three tons of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.

To be sure — the process of making biochar isn’t new. Thousands of years ago, it was used in South America’s Amazonian Basin to make agricultural soils more fertile and more productive. More recently, the U.S. Forest Service has used biochar as a way to promote regrowth in places where forests have been damaged or destroyed.

But the idea of using biochar on a much larger scale is new — and that’s where the Colorado firm Biochar Now enters the picture.

Based in Berthoud, Biochar Now builds and operates specially designed kilns that produce the high temperatures needed for pyrolysis to take place. The kilns are portable, meaning they can be moved to areas with large areas of dead and diseased trees or large stockpiles of industrial wood waste.

The technology has caught the attention of state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

For example: In 2017, the state legislature examined the technology’s potential and concluded it could create a cost-effective way to reduce the number of trees killed by insects and disease on forest lands. Removing this “excess biomass” could “minimize the number and severity of wildfires” in Colorado, the lawmakers concluded.

“We have around a hundred million truckloads of rotting dead trees across the West that need to be cleaned up and hauled out,” Biochar Now’s CEO, James Gaspard, said in a recent interview. “If we don’t use them for biochar, that wood would just be sitting there waiting for the next fire to come through.”

Meeting the energy and environmental needs of our country in the decades ahead will require some major technological breakthroughs. But it would be a mistake to overlook the innovations that are built around existing technologies and practices, some of them age-old.

Biochar is one of those technologies, and it holds the promise of limiting the catastrophic wildfires that have plagued our state, while at the same time helping our farmers.

It’s no surprise that a Colorado firm is leading the charge to scale up this technology. The kind of pragmatic thinking you see in Colorado and across the rest of the Western U.S. is something that the debate over energy and environmental policy in Washington, D.C., badly needs.

Brophy is a farmer and former state senator from Wray, Colo. He is the Colorado director for The Western Way

Arizona’s pro-business climate is a magnet for clean energy investment, but won’t last without skilled workers

This piece from TWW’s Jaime Molera first ran in the Arizona Capitol Times on November 29, 2023 and can be accessed here.

Arizona’s pro-business climate is a magnet for clean energy investment, but won’t last without skilled workers

Jaime A. Molera

Arizona has a strong track record of attracting new business investment and job creation across a host of economic sectors, including aerospace, bioscience, financial services and technology. Moreover, the state’s commitment to low taxes, reasonable limits on business regulation and an affordable cost of living is also a magnet for investment dollars from another industry – clean energy.

But this will only last if Arizona can maintain the skilled workforce needed to translate investment dollars into actual working businesses.

To better understand this trend, The Western Way commissioned an economic analysis on 11 different manufacturing and facility expansion projects in the clean energy sector in various stages of development across the state of Arizona.

While not an exhaustive study the analysis demonstrates that Arizona is already a major destination for clean energy investment. Not only that, but these investments strengthen our economy through job creation and income growth.

During the construction phase, those clean energy investments are expected to create 87,000 jobs in the building industry. With average salaries of around $55,000 per year, those construction jobs will add more than $4.8 billion in labor income to the state economy annually.

During the operations phase, more than 22,000 jobs are expected to be created with average salaries of $60,000 per year – adding more than $1.3 billion in labor income to Arizona’s economy.

These figures aren’t just good news for our state. They also reflect a rising trend following the Covid pandemic: U.S. businesses and consumers are seriously rethinking the reliability of overseas supply chains and showing a strong preference towards products made here in the United States.

“Covid highlighted how shipping costs and shipping availability can shift tremendously depending on what’s happening on the global stage,” Peter Gibson, VP of Sales and Marketing, LG Energy Solution Vertech, said during the summer. “We genuinely believe the North American market, especially the U.S. market, to be the world’s largest and fastest-growing market for grid-scale batteries.”

The energy sector is part of this economy-wide trend, and the push to build more batteries, solar panels and other energy technologies domestically is clearly a major economic opportunity for Arizona. But to fully capitalize on this trend, Arizona leaders in business and government need to make sure that we have workers with the skills to actually perform these jobs.

Last year, a coalition of business groups – the Greater Phoenix Chamber, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Northern Arizona Leadership Alliance and the Southern Arizona Leadership Council – predicted a shortfall of more than 26,000 bachelor’s degrees between now and 2030, meaning that number of jobs “will not develop or go unfilled.”

“Arizona has an opportunity to become a national hub of technology, research and innovation,” the coalition said in its report. “However, unless our state meets the workforce challenges inherent in these growing industries, Arizona’s potential will be severely constrained by labor shortages.”

To prevent such a shortage, leaders in the private and public sectors should work together to expand programs like ElevateEDAZ, a program of the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation (where I serve as Chairman).

ElevateEDAZ partners with K-12 schools and school districts to build pathways for students to jobs in high-demand industries through career and technical training programs. Many different strategies are used, including career-focused training courses, internships, job shadows and real-time industry feedback to ensure that the skills being taught are keeping up with workforce trends.

Jobs in the technology sector are a major focus, but so are other high demand careers in other sectors, such as healthcare, construction, education and public safety.

“If the supply of skilled workers is not maintained, the state and region will continue to grow, but with lower quality jobs,” the Greater Phoenix Chamber cautioned earlier this year. “The remaining question is whether or not leaders will continue to aggressively advance the economy with an emphasis on workforce development.”

This is clearly the top priority of forward-thinking Arizona business leaders. It’s time that state and local business leaders showed the same resolve.

Jaime A. Molera is former Arizona state school superintendent, partner of Molera Alvarez, and the Arizona director for The Western Way, a nonprofit organization that builds support for market-driven solutions to environmental challenges.

Iron batteries offer an energy transition lesson

This piece from TWW Fellow SImon Lomax was first published by Cipher and can be accessed here.

Iron batteries offer an energy transition lesson

Simon Lomax -Guest Author

To build a zero-carbon economy, we need technologies that can store large amounts of energy for a long time.

With better energy storage, we can generate more electricity from wind turbines and solar panels, and then put that electricity to work whenever it’s needed and not just when weather conditions are favorable.

So far, the field of energy storage has been dominated by large batteries, and lithium-ion batteries in particular. These are the types of batteries found in cell phones, laptop computers and, on a bigger scale, electric cars.

But in Colorado, a promising new battery technology is being prepared for use by the state’s largest utility, Xcel Energy. It’s called an “iron-air” battery and, quite fittingly, it will be built in the iron and steel town of Pueblo.

Iron smelting and steel production first started in Pueblo in the 1880s. The city later became known as the “Pittsburgh of the West.” While Pueblo’s steel industry may be smaller now, rails, pipes and other steel products are still made there today.

The iron-air battery, developed by Boston-based startup Form Energy, is slated for construction on the same site as Xcel’s Comanche coal-fired power plant, which is due for retirement by 2031. The 10-megawatt (MW) battery will hold electricity for 100 hours (just over four days) and will take advantage of the existing transmission infrastructure at the site to connect to the power grid.

While iron-air batteries are less efficient than lithium-ion batteries, iron is more abundant and much cheaper than lithium. This means the cost of storage could be more than 10 times cheaper than lithium-iron batteries and come with fewer supply chain risks, according to Form Energy CEO Mateo Jaramillo.

The company also says long duration iron-air batteries and shorter duration lithium-ion batteries have complementary roles, depending on how many hours or how many days of energy storage the power grid needs at a given time.

In Pueblo, Form Energy’s iron-air battery will store some of the renewable electricity generated by nearby solar panels and wind turbines and then feed it back into the grid later, when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. In parallel, Xcel is developing another 10 MW iron-air battery project in Becker, Minnesota, at the site of another coal-fired power plant scheduled for retirement in under a decade.

Iron-air batteries are based on the same chemical reaction that turns iron into iron oxide, better known as rust.

The battery pulls in oxygen from the surrounding air and when the oxygen reacts with the iron inside the battery, an electrical current is generated. To recharge, this process is reversed: Electricity from a wind turbine or solar panel moves through the battery in the opposite direction, turning iron oxide back into iron and oxygen.

The battery breathes in oxygen to generate electricity and breathes out oxygen to store electricity, a process called “reversible rusting.”

Rusting isn’t new. It’s been with us since, literally, the Iron Age. Indeed, that’s the innovation behind the iron-air battery – it harnesses something old to make something new. Connecting these batteries to the power grid where coal plants have stood for decades is also a mix of old and new.

There’s a bigger lesson here about the energy transition. Extreme voices on both sides of politics assert that a new energy economy requires the total rejection of the old energy economy.

But to succeed, we’re going to need breakthroughs that apply existing technologies in new and innovative ways in addition to completely novel solutions that may take years or even decades to fully develop.

Other examples include geothermal and mining for minerals needed for clean energy.

Techniques for drilling oil and natural gas wells can be applied to the process of drilling deep below the Earth’s surface to find heat and produce geothermal energy.

Finding all the materials needed to build a wide swath of clean-energy technologies will require the mining sector, another age-old and often unfairly maligned industry.

It took great ideas and hardworking people to build the energy economy we have today, and it will take great ideas and hardworking people to build the energy economy of tomorrow.

Simon Lomax is a visiting fellow with The Western Way, a conservative nonprofit that seeks pro-market solutions to environmental challenges, and a program manager with the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. You can reach him at slomax@mines.edu.

Is the least populated state in the nation leading the next U.S. energy transition?

This piece from TWW’s John Karakoulakis first ran in UtilityDive on October 31, 2023 and can be accessed here.

Is the least populated state in the nation leading the next U.S. energy transition?

To the surprise of many, Wyoming may serve as the epicenter of the next U.S. energy boom.

More than two decades ago, a small group of engineers and geologists in Texas developed a process to produce natural gas from shale rock formations buried thousands of feet below the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs. That breakthrough would later kickstart an energy boom across the United States — a trend that became known as “the energy transition.”

Natural gas from shale created a domestic energy supply that empowered the United States to break its long-standing reliance on foreign energy sources and drive historical economic growth. Power plants that burned natural gas also made the grid more flexible, supporting a major expansion of renewable sources of electricity like solar panels and wind turbines, which have dramatically come down in price but still need backup when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

Twenty years later, the United States is on the front end of another energy transition. While traditional energy supplies remain essential to light our homes and power our cars, it is now inevitable that emerging energy technologies will have an increasing role in the U.S. energy supply. To the surprise of many, Wyoming may serve as the epicenter of the next U.S. energy boom. 

While Wyoming has the lowest population of any state in the country, it ranks as the third largest energy-producing state in the United States. It continues to serve as a top ten oil and gas producing state and is the nation’s top producer of coal. But Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon will be the first to tell you that a transition to low-carbon energy sources will be an economic opportunity for states that lead with vision and foresight.

More than 20% of Wyoming’s electricity already comes from wind turbines and that number is growing. The state is on track to become a major exporter of wind energy to neighboring states and major urban markets across the West. Based on recent infrastructure investments like the $3 billion TransWest Express transmission line project, Wyoming is better situated than perhaps any other state to lead the next energy transition. 

“We know that we don’t have time to waste,” Gov. Gordon said at the June groundbreaking for the 732-mile TransWest line in Rawlins, Wyoming, which succeeded despite fifteen years of federal permitting delays. “We have to move, with diligence, forward to make sure that we address the issue of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with alacrity, with diligence and with dedication.”

And Wyoming’s pivot to emerging energy sources is not limited to its abundant supply of wind. Recognizing the limitations on weather-dependent sources of energy like wind and solar, Wyoming is also leading specific initiatives to promote additional innovative energy solutions.

Wyoming is hosting a partnership between utility company PacifiCorp and a leading nuclear reactor manufacturer TerraPower, to build its first reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming — a small town with a coal-fired power plant that is due for retirement in 2025. The closure of the coal plant, without anything to replace it, would devastate the community’s workforce and tax base. The projected $4 billion investment in the new nuclear reactor presents a critical economic opportunity for this Wyoming community. The project is a “game changer,” Gov. Gordon said at the May groundbreaking of the TerraPower project.

As chairman of the Western Governors Association, Gov. Gordon has prioritized Western states taking a leadership role in the areas of carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS, technology to minimize and eventually eliminate carbon emissions from coal, oil and natural gas. The development of this technology would particularly benefit Wyoming based on the state’s rich supply of fossil fuel resources and the critical role this energy source has on the state’s economy. 

Gov. Gordon recently explained the economic and environmental benefits carbon capture technologies could have on traditional energy producing states like Wyoming. “Ignoring CCUS as a viable option to decarbonize the grid creates an energy gap. Shuttering coal-fired power plants before alternative resources are fully developed will exacerbate power shortages, brownouts and blackouts, higher fuel costs and higher-priced electricity.” 

To the surprise of most Americans, Wyoming has emerged as a leader in the rapidly changing U.S. energy market. Gov. Gordon and other state leaders recognize that supporting a true “all of the above” energy plan will not only improve the climate but has the real potential to unleash a generational economic opportunity for the state.  

While so many other state leaders are stuck in neutral, focused on quantifying the actual impacts of climate change, Wyoming is taking action. State leaders like Gov. Gordon are dispatching resources to drive practical solutions that also deliver economic opportunities to businesses and working families. It is a refreshingly pragmatic and positive approach that other key players in the U.S. energy and climate debate should follow.

REPORT RELEASE: Arizona’s Pro-Business Climate Drives New Jobs and Workforce Needs

A new economic impact study released by The Western Way examines the creation of new jobs in Arizona from recently announced manufacturing businesses in the clean energy sector.  The results of the study shows the importance of Arizona’s private and public sector leaders working together to meet the growing workforce needs and sustain economic investments in Arizona.   

The study which is a snapshot of 11 different manufacturing and facility expansion projects in the clean energy sector ranging from EV and battery to solar manufacturing found the following workforce needs and economic benefits:

• During the construction phase, the 11 projects are expected to create 87,000 jobs in the construction industry with average salaries of $55,000 per year.

• During the operations phase, more than 22,000 jobs are expected to be created with average salaries of $60,000 per year.

• The combined total economic impact of these construction jobs ($4.8 billion) and operations jobs ($1.3 billion) will add over $6.1 billon in labor income to the State of Arizona

The Western Way’s Arizona State Director Jaime Molera said, “Thanks to Arizona’s pro-business climate the state is a major destination for clean energy investment. Not only that, these investments are strengthening our economy through job creation and income growth. But to fully capitalize and expand on this trend, Arizona leaders in business and government need to make sure that we have workers with the skills to actually perform these jobs.”

Programs like ElevateEDAZ, from the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation, are crucial to meeting this growing workforce need.  ElevateEDAZ partners with K-12 schools and school districts to build pathways for students to jobs in high-demand industries through career and technical training programs. 

The full report, Arizona’s Pro-Business Climate: A Magnet for Clean Energy Investment and Job Creation is available here.

Colorado-based national lab provides the facts we need to make smart energy decisions

This piece by TWW’s Greg Brophy originally ran in the Sterling Journal Advocate on October 20, 2023 and can be accessed here.

Colorado-based national lab provides the facts we need to make smart energy decisions

By GREG BROPHY

As a conservative and a recovering legislator, I’ve always believed that public policy should be based on facts, not feelings. Laws, regulations and spending decisions from elected officials and executive branch agencies should be driven by science, economics and other relevant fields of research – not ideology or special interests.

It’s simple really: Ignore the facts when making policy, and the policy won’t work. As founding father John Adams famously quipped: Facts are stubborn things.

But that raises the question: Where do we find the facts to create rational and effective public policies?

In the area of energy policy, the network of 18 national labs – including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden – is a great place to start.

For example: Some supporters of renewable energy try to argue that wind and solar can take over the whole energy system more or less immediately. But the experts at NREL will be the first to tell you that’s just not possible right now.

In reports that are easily accessible on the website, NREL experts share the facts about the power grid, including the fact that variable sources like wind and solar need some form of backup power, whether it’s a natural gas-fired power plant or a large-scale battery .

NREL researchers also respond to the myths that are sometimes used to oppose renewable energy projects. For example, concerns about electromagnetic fields from solar arrays don’t have a factual basis. Those fields are “similar to household appliances within close proximity, which dissipate with increasing distance and pose no health risk to neighboring residents,” according to NREL .

Another myth is that reflected sunlight from solar panels can pose a safety risk for passing motorists or even aircraft. Again, NREL sets the record straight : “[Solar] modules use non-reflective glass and are designed to absorb rather than reflect the light that hits the panels in order to convert solar energy into electricity. PV modules are generally less reflective than windows and are installed at numerous airports.”

To be sure, there are real challenges associated with renewable sources of energy – just as there are with traditional sources of energy. But NREL also provides the context that is often missing in political arguments.

Case in point: The controversy over what to do with old wind turbine blades when they’re decommissioned.

NREL estimates that between 2025 and 2040, between 10,000 to 20,000 blades each year will reach the end of their useful life. Based on current practices, almost 80% those blades will end up in landfills.

Wind industry critics have jumped on this practice, claiming it shows that renewables are actually bad for the environment. But NREL’s research provides an important reality check . Even if nothing is done to make use of the materials in retired wind turbine blades, they would only represent about 1% of the nation’s total discarded waste by 2050.

A challenge, yes, but hardly a reason to claim that wind farms are bad for the environment.

NREL researchers are investigating new practices for recycling these blades, which are typically a mix of steel, plastic and composite materials. One solution being explored is shredding the blades in order to make them less bulky and cheaper to transport from where they are currently in operation to industrial plants that can turn those materials into something useful.

Reducing transportation costs by just one third could prevent 50% to 90% of discarded wind turbines from ending up in landfills, NREL researchers have concluded.

It should be noted that NREL’s contribution isn’t just about research. Because the lab is literally in our backyard, Colorado sees important economic benefits as well. More than 2,000 staff work at NREL, making it one of the five largest employers in Jefferson County, and its annual economic impact is estimated at $875 million per year.

As a farmer, I’ve witnessed the tremendous economic contributions of renewable energy in Eastern Colorado. But I recognize there are limits and tradeoffs associated with any form of energy, whether it’s wind and solar or oil and gas.

The key, as I see it, is making smart decisions about which technologies make sense in some settings and don’t make sense in others. To have any chance of making those smart decisions, we need good information grounded in science.

Facts matter and Coloradans should be proud to know that many of the world’s leading experts on renewable energy live and work in our state.

Greg Brophy is a former state senator and farmer from Wray. He is the Colorado Director of The Western Way.

Utah is ramping up geothermal, using oil and gas tech

This piece from TWW’s Steve Handy was first published by The Salt Lake Tribune on September 30, 2023 and can be accessed here.

Steve Handy: Utah is ramping up geothermal, using oil and gas tech

The energy technologies of the future are closer than you think, because in some cases, they are closely connected to the energy technologies of today.

Hydrogen fuels and advanced nuclear reactors are good examples. But arguably the best example is geothermal energy, which involves the very same drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies that fueled a massive boom in U.S. oil and natural gas production.

Utah is about to play a major leadership role in the next phase of geothermal energy production, following the announcement of a large new project in Beaver County.

Northeast of Milford, startup company Fervo Energy has received federal permits to drill 29 geothermal wells that will use heat from deep geological formations to generate electricity. Together, the wells are expected to have a generating capacity of 90 megawatts or more.

Fervo Energy has already secured buyers for the electricity and the geothermal facility is expected to enter commercial operation in 2026. By 2028, the project is expected to grow to 400 megawatts.

The Beaver County project will apply technology that was proven on a pilot scale in northern Nevada. There, Fervo Energy drilled vertically to a depth of around 7,700 feet and then horizontally for 3,250 feet, where underground temperatures exceeded 370 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cold water was pumped down the well and circulated back to the surface hundreds of degrees hotter, where it will be used to drive a turbine that generates electricity without any carbon emissions. Not only that, electricity production from geothermal does not depend on weather conditions like other renewables like wind and solar, which makes it more reliable for utility companies and their customers.

“By applying drilling technology from the oil and gas industry, we have proven that we can produce 24/7 carbon-free energy resources in new geographies across the world,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo Energy’s CEO and co-founder, who was an oil and gas drilling engineer before going to work in geothermal.

Even before Fervo Energy’s Beaver County project, Utah was one of the nation’s pioneering geothermal states.

A major geothermal field laboratory, known as the Utah FORGE, is also located outside of Milford and it operates with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Utah’s Energy and Geoscience Institute. And there are currently three operating geothermal power plants in our state, with a combined generating capacity of just over 70 megawatts, according to the Utah Geological Survey.

But the completion of Fervo Energy’s new Utah project would more than double the state’s geothermal generating capacity, and state officials say that could just be the beginning. The state has “enormous geothermal energy potential,” according to the Utah Office of Energy Development.

State officials have projected more than 2,000 megawatts of additional geothermal electricity capacity could be developed in Utah. For scale, that’s the equivalent of two large scale nuclear power plants.

Nationwide, U.S. officials project that geothermal electric capacity could grow by 60,000 megawatts over the next three decades. That’s the equivalent of 60 large scale nuclear plants being built at a pace of more than two per year.

No doubt, a range of different geothermal technologies will be deployed. But if most of them utilize drilling and fracking like Fervo Energy, imagine how this provides additional career prospects for oil and gas workers, who know more about drilling and fracking than anyone else.

This is what most political actors in the energy space — on the left and on the right — get wrong about the so-called energy transition. As we add new sources of energy to the nation’s supply, new energy jobs will come with them, and the people best suited for those jobs are working in the energy sector already.

At the end of the day, the energy business is about building things, whether it’s a geothermal well, a wind farm, a natural gas turbine, or a solar array. The mix of technologies will change over time, as it always has, but the need for people who can build things will not.

The energy business has never been a zero-sum game and in my view it never will be. The geothermal breakthroughs we are seeing in Utah, based on oil and gas sector technologies, shows this to be true.

Steve Handy is a former state legislator and the Utah director for The Western Way, an organization focused on market-competitive solutions to environmental and conservation challenges.

NREL Drives Innovation in Renewable Energy and Commercialization

In the quest for cost-effective renewable energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) stands at the forefront, leading the world in pioneering innovations. NREL, based in Golden, Colorado, is renowned for its cutting-edge research in renewable energy technologies and its unwavering commitment to transitioning these innovations into practical, market-ready solutions.

A Global Hub for Renewable Energy Research

NREL, a part of the U.S. Department of Energy's network of national laboratories, is a world-class institution dedicated to advancing renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. For decades, NREL has been a driving force behind renewable energy innovation, working tirelessly to develop, test, and refine a wide array of clean energy solutions.

Here's how they lead the world in innovation:

Cutting-Edge Research: NREL's multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, and researchers are engaged in groundbreaking research across various fields, including solar, wind, geothermal, and bioenergy. Their work spans from fundamental scientific discoveries to applied engineering, ensuring that every aspect of renewable energy is explored.

State-of-the-Art Facilities: NREL boasts some of the most advanced research facilities in the world. These facilities allow scientists to conduct experiments, develop prototypes, and rigorously test renewable energy technologies, making NREL a vital asset in driving innovation.

Collaboration and Partnerships: NREL collaborates with universities, private industry, and international partners, creating a global network of experts to tackle the world's energy challenges. These partnerships foster knowledge sharing and accelerate the commercialization of renewable energy technologies.

Commercialization: Bridging Research to Reality

One of NREL's key strengths is its commitment to taking research out of the laboratory and into the market. NREL has a dedicated Technology Transfer Office that specializes in transforming research findings into commercial technologies. They facilitate licensing agreements, partnerships, and collaborations with private companies, ensuring that innovations reach consumers.

NREL has a track record of spinning off successful companies. These ventures have their roots in NREL research and have gone on to make significant contributions to the renewable energy sector, driving industry growth and creating jobs.

NREL also supports innovation through programs like the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (IEC). This center fosters an entrepreneurial spirit among NREL employees and collaborators, helping them transform ideas into marketable products.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is not just a hub for renewable energy research; it is a leader in creating new market opportunities. Through its cutting-edge research and dedicated efforts to commercialize innovations, NREL leads the way in shaping the future of renewable energy.  

Heating Up the Game: Peppermill's Sustainable Power Play with Geothermal Energy

Nestled in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Peppermill Resort and Casino in Reno, Nevada, is much more than just a hot spot for gaming and entertainment; it's a testament to innovation and sustainability. In a region known for its breathtaking natural beauty and geothermal potential, the Peppermill has harnessed the Earth's heat to power and heat its sprawling facilities.  This is no small feat for considering the hotel and casino has two 19-story towers with 2.1 million square foot interior, 1,635 guest rooms, 43,000 square-foot spa, not to mention restaurants, convention space, and casino.  

This bold and forward-thinking initiative is a prime example of how the gaming industry can lead the way in adopting renewable energy sources. Let's take a closer look at how the Peppermill Resort and Casino uses geothermal energy to reduce its carbon footprint and create a more sustainable future.

Harnessing Earth's Heat:

Reno, Nevada, is located in an area with significant geothermal resources due to its proximity to the geothermally active Great Basin. Geothermal energy is generated by tapping into the Earth's heat, which lies just beneath the surface. Peppermill recognized this valuable resource and implemented a groundbreaking project that utilizes geothermal energy for both heating and cooling purposes. The resort draws geothermal energy from underground wells, which are then converted into sustainable power and heat for the property.

Economic Benefits

By incorporating geothermal energy into its operations, the Peppermill Resort and Casino has not only shown its commitment to environmental sustainability but also reaped financial benefits.  The resort made a $9.7 million investment to build out its one of a kind geothermal system in 2007 and the Peppermill’s savings from the geothermal system was able to pay for itself in just three years. 

1. Lower Energy Costs: The utilization of geothermal energy has significantly reduced the resort's energy expenses. By tapping into the Earth's heat, the Peppermill can efficiently heat and cool its extensive property while keeping utility bills in check.

2. Energy Independence: The resort is less reliant on conventional power sources, making it less susceptible to fluctuating energy prices and supply interruptions. This energy security is a valuable asset in the long term.

3. Positive Guest Experience: Many guests are increasingly drawn to eco-friendly and sustainable resorts. The Peppermill's commitment to geothermal energy enhances its reputation and attracts environmentally conscious visitors.

Sustainable Energy Production:

The Peppermill's geothermal system is a true marvel of sustainable engineering. This state-of-the-art system operates through a network of wells and heat exchangers, transferring geothermal heat from the earth to power the resort's various energy needs. The resort's heating, cooling, and hot water requirements are all efficiently met using this geothermal source, which significantly reduces its dependence on conventional fossil fuels. By utilizing this natural, renewable energy source, the Peppermill has not only reduced its carbon emissions but also decreased its reliance on the grid and non-renewable resources.

A Model for Sustainable Gaming:

The Peppermill, serves as a beacon of sustainability in the gaming industry. By embracing geothermal energy, the resort demonstrates how casinos and entertainment hubs can lead the way in adopting renewable energy sources. They've shown that it's possible to marry high-stakes entertainment with low-impact sustainability, proving that economic growth and environmental responsibility can coexist.

The Peppermill’s use of geothermal energy is an important example of how innovative thinking and sustainable practices can thrive in the gaming industry. By harnessing the Earth's natural heat, they have not only reduced environmental impact but also saved in operating costs.

Western Governor's Lead During NCEW

September 25-29 is National Clean Energy Week (NCEW), an annual week-long celebration of clean energy innovation and help solve the world’s most pressing challenges in nuclear, solar, wind, wave, hydropower, geothermal, natural gas, biomass, carbon capture, storage, and waste-to-energy technologies. 

This all of the above energy policy event allows participants to hear directly from policymakers and top speakers in clean energy investment and innovation. National Clean Energy Week is made possible by a network of national clean energy leaders dedicated to reducing emissions while growing the economy through smart policy and technological innovation.

Western Governor’s in AZ, CO, ID, NM, NV, and UT all signed proclamations this week highlighting their states’ unique and important roles in driving energy innovation and increasing clean domestic energy production.

Fervo Energy Cape Station Groundbreaking

Earlier this month TWW had the opportunity to attend the groundbreaking of Fervo Energy's Cape Station Project in Beaver County, UT.  Once completed the project will be the largest enhanced geothermal project in the world producing over 400 MW of firm 24/7 renewable electricity.

Cape Station will provide roughly 6,600 jobs during construction and 160 full-time jobs throughout its operations, generating more than $437 million in earned wages. Federal, state, and local officials joined Fervo to celebrate this milestone.

Utah is home to immense geothermal potential. Researchers estimate that the southwest portion of the state contains more than 10 GW of high-quality geothermal reserves. Additionally, Cape Station will benefit from the Department of Energy’s Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE). Over the last six years, FORGE has completed groundbreaking research that has dramatically advanced geothermal development in the region.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox said, “Utah is no stranger to energy leadership. For decades, oil and gas workers in the Uinta Basin have produced energy vital to the growth of not just our state but our nation. Geothermal innovations like those pioneered by Fervo will play a critical role in extending Utah’s energy leadership for generations to come.”

Earlier this year, Fervo announced breakthrough result of its commercial pilot project, Project Red in Winnemucca, NV. Using drilling technology honed in the oil and gas industry, Fervo performed a 30 day well test, the results of which established Project Red as the most productive enhanced geothermal system in history.

“Beaver County, Utah is the perfect place to deploy our next-generation geothermal technology,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo Energy CEO and Co-Founder. “The warmth and hospitality we have experienced from the communities of Milford and Beaver have allowed us to embark on a clean energy journey none of us could have imagined just a few years ago. Thanks to cutting edge research and data collection from FORGE, Fervo can accelerate the production of the region’s geothermal resources.”

Cape Station is now positioned to channel $1.1 billion to supply chains and local businesses, catalyzing critical growth in the county. Fervo is working with experienced oil and gas companies, including Helmerich & Payne, Devon Energy, and Liberty Energy.

Solar panels above crops and livestock is a win for energy and agriculture

This piece from TWW’s Greg Brophy was originally published by the Fence Post on September 22, 2023 and can be accessed here.

Building solar panels above crops and livestock is a win for energy and agriculture

News NEWS | Sep 22, 2023

By Greg Brophy

Out of small things, big things can grow.

That’s true for businesses, technological advances and many other human endeavors. Speaking as a corn and melon farmer from Colorado’s Eastern Plains, I can say it’s also true about agriculture — literally so. Between planting season and harvest season, the speed of growth in a good crop year is truly amazing. 

I have similarly high hopes for a new initiative in Colorado that combines farming with the generation of electricity from photovoltaic solar panels. The practice of co-locating crops, livestock and solar panels — better known as agrivoltaics — is not widespread just yet. But it’s promising and builds on generations of complementary energy production in farming and ranching communities — from wind turbines to biofuels, renewable natural gas to traditional hydrocarbons.

The first and most obvious benefit of agrivoltaics is the revenue that farmers and ranchers receive from the solar panels themselves, just as they would from any other source of energy production on their land.

But there are other benefits too. When solar panels are sited correctly and boosted several feet above the ground, the shade they provide creates different growing conditions — or microclimates — on a farm or a ranch. This allows for a wider range of crops and livestock to be raised, giving the landowner more options for boosting the productivity of their land.

The shade also reduces the amount of water needed for irrigation, and in return, the vegetation underneath the solar panels keeps those panels cooler, boosting operational efficiency and the amount of electricity they produce.

I saw this first-hand on a recent tour of Jack’s Solar Garden, the largest active research site for agrivoltaics in the country, located just south of Longmont, Colo. More than 15 crop varieties are being grown there under the partial shade of more than 3,000 solar panels.

It’s an elegant solution that holds the promise of diffusing land-use conflicts over renewable energy before they even start.

The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that solar panels may need as much as 10.3 million acres of land by 2050, depending on how much the sector grows over the coming decades. That’s more than twice the size of the state of New Jersey, and it will require large-scale solar arrays to be built where there are wide open spaces.

Some of that development will take place — and is already taking place — in rural communities where agriculture isn’t just an economic driver, it’s a source of tremendous pride.

While the wind industry was quick to observe this, it’s taken longer for some in the solar industry to realize that farmers and ranchers don’t want to trade agricultural land for energy-producing land. They want to use their land for both agriculture and energy, not just for business reasons, but for personal reasons, too.

The potential for agrivoltaics to offer the best of both worlds has caught the attention of Colorado lawmakers. Earlier this year, a bipartisan bill — SB23-092 — passed the state legislature with overwhelming support.

Sen. Cleave Simpson and Rep. Matt Soper, both Republicans, worked with two Democrats, Sen. Chris Hansen and Rep. Karen McCormick, to get the bill through what was otherwise a very contentious legislative session. The fact that Simpson is a farmer and rancher and McCormick is a veterinarian probably helped them explain why the concept of agrivoltaics holds such promise.  

The bill’s provisions on agrivoltaics are quite modest, which as a fiscal conservative, strikes me as a good idea. The legislation authorizes $500,000 in state grants to support other small-scale agrivoltaic projects to see if the success of Jack’s Solar Garden can be repeated elsewhere.

I’m sure it will be, even though it may take years before this kind of innovation becomes standard across much bigger farming and ranching operations. It will take some time for agrivoltaics to gain familiarity and trust among farmers and ranchers, and what works on a small scale may need some modification and improvement before it can work on a much larger scale.

But the potential of this emerging agricultural and energy partnership is undeniable. Even if it starts small, I have a feeling it will eventually grow into something much, much bigger.

Brophy is a former state senator and farmer from Wray, Colo. He is the Colorado director for The Western Way.

Conservatives aren’t against climate action. These Utahns are proving it

This piece from TWW’s Steve Handy first ran on September 19, 2023 in the Deseret News and can be accessed here.

Conservatives aren’t against climate action. These Utahns are proving it

The real debate over greenhouse gases and climate change isn’t whether we should be reducing emissions — it’s how we go about reducing emissions

By Steve Handy

Sept 19, 2023, 1:00pm MDT

Political pundits and reporters in the national media have a habit of dividing up the country into one of two groups: Those who are “for” something and those who are “against” it.

In the case of energy and climate, the national media portrays progressive politicians and activist groups as being “for” reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while conservatives are wholeheartedly “against” it.

That kind of all-or-nothing media coverage does not serve our country well, because the real debate over greenhouse gases and climate change isn’t whether we should be reducing emissions — it’s how we go about reducing emissions. 

Once you’ve had that reality check, it quickly becomes clear that conservatives have some of the best ideas about how to reduce emissions without sacrificing all the other things we care about as a country.

For this reason, it was heartening to attend the second annual Conservative Climate Summit at Utah Valley University earlier this month. Hosted by Republican Utah Rep. John Curtis, the event brought together some of the leading conservative voices in the nation on energy and environmental issues.

Curtis is the chairman of the Conservative Climate Caucus, which is on a mission to develop and promote market-driven solutions to environmental challenges, rather than big-government schemes which carry costs that outweigh any of the benefits.

The leaders who joined Curtis at this year’s conference included Rep. Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources; Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican and vice chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus; and Wyoming’s Republican Gov. Mark Gordon.

Former Rep. Chris Stewart and the Republican nominee who is running for the seat he recently retired from, Celeste Maloy, also took part.

On the sidelines of this year’s summit, Curtis explained that left-wing environmental policies in Europe are a cautionary tale. Those policies largely prevented fracking for oil and natural gas and curtailed Europe’s ability to generate clean electricity with nuclear power.

The result: sky-high energy prices and a dangerous dependence on Russia for imported natural gas. The terrible cost of anti-fracking, anti-nuclear policies was driven home by the energy shocks that Europe experienced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, had the U.S. not come to Europe’s rescue with a massive increase in shipments of liquefied natural gas, there could have been a major humanitarian disaster across the entire continent last winter.

“Europe went down a path (and) they made some really bad decisions,” Curtis said in an interview with the Sutherland Institute.

“If (conservatives) are not at the table pointing out the fallacy of those decisions, (America) will likely make the same mistakes.” 

The key for conservatives: realizing that there are major environmental benefits to other policy positions they take.

For example: Dependence on Russian gas wasn’t just a security problem for Europe. It was a major climate problem, because Russia’s decrepit oil and gas infrastructure was a major source of methane emissions, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases. 

Switching to U.S. natural gas was a major win for the climate. Because our oil and gas industry is not controlled by the state, it operates in a competitive market, it’s better capitalized, and it can afford the kind of environmental controls that dramatically limit methane emissions.

So, conservatives who supported the increase in U.S. energy exports to Europe for geopolitical and trade reasons may not realize that their position was also good for the climate, too. 

“The same policy that is best for our environment is the same policy that is also best for national security, energy independence, agriculture and our economy,” Curtis told attendees of the conservative climate summit.

Westerman, chairman of the natural resources committee, told the summit about another example of conservative ideas having major environmental benefits.

Cutting red tape and taking on the bureaucracy are cherished conservative ideals. But even left-of-center politicians and interest groups believe we need to speed up the permitting process for energy projects of all kinds, including solar and wind.

Not only that, the nation needs a faster permitting process for the mining projects needed to produce the materials that go into solar panels and wind turbines, not to mention electric cars. 

That’s why the debt-ceiling compromise bill passed earlier this year included major permitting reforms that House Republicans championed before anyone else, Westerman told the summit.

“It’s often implied, ‘Well, you’re a conservative, therefore you don’t care about the environment, you don’t care about climate,’” Stewart, who retired in mid-September as the representative for Utah’s 2nd Congressional District, told the summit. “Well, what nonsense.”

In private company, I might use a stronger word than “nonsense,” but he’s absolutely right. Unwinding these false and unhelpful stereotypes will take time, but thanks to Utah leaders like Curtis, it is finally happening.   

Steve Handy is a former Utah legislator and Utah state director for The Western Way.

Agrivoltaics Benefits Farmers and Rural Communities

This month TWW, local officials, and Colorado agriculture leaders had the opportunity to tour Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, CO.  Jack’s Solar Garden is a pioneer in agrivoltaics, which is the co-locating of solar panels with beneficial agriculture. Jack’s is the largest commercial research site for agrivoltaics in the United States.  Jack’s partners with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Colorado State University, and the University of Arizona to conduct a variety of research on the feasibility and best practices for agrivoltaics and then disseminates that information to farmers interested in adopting the practice.  With land usage for solar production expected to increase rapidly over the next several decades, especially in rural communities, agrivoltaics could allow for farmers to use their land for both energy and food production. 

Jack’s is showing that agrivoltaics can provide a variety of benefits to farmers and landowners including water conservation, higher crop yields, improved soil quality, crop protection and increased revenue from land with dual uses.   Research is showing that the solar panels can create microclimates under the panels which support increased crop yields for certain plants and use less water, with some crops needing almost half the traditional amount of water required. 

Learn more in this video below from Byron Kominek, the owner and founder of Jack’s Solar Garden.

Conservative Energy Network Meets in Iowa

Earlier this month, TWW joined members of conservative free market organizations from across the country at the Conservative Energy Network’s annual gathering in Des Moines, Iowa from August 14-17th. The network heard from technical experts, industry representatives, and policymakers. Notable speakers included U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Congressman Zach Nunn (IA-3) as well as Iowa State Senators Mike Klimesh and Waylon Brown, and State Representatives Brian Lohse and Shannon Lundgren.

John Szoka, CEO of the Conservative Energy Network noted:

“CEN’s annual Conservative Conclave represents a gathering of conservatives who are leading the charge in shaping America’s energy future. We are stronger when we come together to learn from each other and build relationships that cross state lines.”

Senator Chuck Grassley with TWW’s Steve Handy and David Oman from the Iowa Conservative Energy Forum

Economic benefits start to flow from power line project after 15-year delay

The opinion piece below from TWW’s Greg Brophy originally ran in The Daily Sentinel on August 8, 2023 and can be accessed here.

Economic benefits start to flow from power line project after 15-year delay

Aug 8, 2023

By GREG BROPHY

Much has been said about the federal permitting reforms that were included in the bipartisan deal to raise the federal debt ceiling and avoid the threat of a first-ever default on the national debt.

Those reforms, originally championed by House Republicans and eventually supported by the Biden White House, will make the federal permitting process for newly proposed energy and infrastructure projects faster and more focused.

But if the Biden administration truly supports the cause of permitting reform, it will also have to move quickly on permitting decisions for existing proposals that have been stuck in the process for years.

Every day those projects continue to be held up under the old rules is another day that mostly rural communities will be denied the considerable economic benefits tied to the construction and operation of those projects.

Consider the case of the TransWest Express Transmission Project, which will connect wind farms in Wyoming with major urban centers on the West Coast.

Despite the clear benefits of the 732-mile transmission line, it was held up for 15 years in a textbook example of how broken the federal permitting process had become.

At one stage, different parts of the federal bureaucracy were actively working against each other on opposite sides of the debate over whether to build the project or whether to block it. Your tax dollars at work, as they say.

Earlier this year, sanity prevailed at last, and the project got the final approvals needed from the federal government. Construction started in June, and the groundbreaking brought together officials from across the spectrum: Republicans and Democrats, business groups and labor unions.

The event brought into focus something that was almost completely forgotten during the interminably long permitting process: The economic benefits from building and operating the power line itself.

TransWest Express is a $2.9 billion project, and in rural America, that’s a big deal. Not just because of the jobs tied to building and operating the project, but because of the local tax revenues a $2.9 billion capital project is able to generate.

An analysis prepared by TransWest estimates $891 million in property taxes will be paid across four states — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Nevada — during the long-term life of this project.

A further $113 million in sales taxes will be generated as well, according to the TransWest analysis. Taken together, the property and sales taxes from this landmark transmission line project will total more than $1 billion over 50 years.

On average, that’s more than $20 million per year going into local services: From schools to law enforcement, fire protection to parks and recreation, public libraries to public hospitals.

Many of these local services in the rural West operate with budgets measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, so an extra $20 million per year on average is a big deal.

But that’s just scratching the surface. The construction of a major new transmission line will spur investment in new power generation projects that will connect to that transmission line. New solar arrays, wind farms, advanced nuclear reactors and other forms of electricity generation will generate further economic activity, including jobs and tax revenues.

These projects can make a huge difference in rural America. A study conducted by The Western Way, where I serve as Colorado state director, examined the upside for communities that see major new investments in renewable energy.

The study, which focused on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, found that funding for local services in a community with major renewable energy investments grew twice as fast as a neighboring community with little to no renewable energy investments.

“The construction phase boosts the Main Street economy and wind farms generate a lot of property tax revenue, which helps school districts, fire districts, county government, city government and other local services in our community,” Kit Carson County Commissioner Dave Hornung told the authors of the study.

The lesson from the TransWest Express case is that permitting delays don’t just hurt the companies that want to build infrastructure projects. Permitting delays also hurt local communities by denying them the economic benefits — including badly needed tax revenues — that flow from those projects.

Washington, D.C. bureaucrats don’t need to wait for a new round of permits, submitted under new rules, to make things better. They can start today by finding projects that have been needlessly delayed and give them the green light as soon as possible.

Greg Brophy is a farmer and former state senator from Wray. He is currently the Colorado Director for The Western Way.

A better way to store energy for the West’s power grid

This opinion piece from TWW’s Greg Brophy originally ran in Colorado Politics on July 12, 2023 and can be accessed here.

Over the next decade, rural communities in Western states have a huge opportunity to increase the amount of energy they provide to major urban centers. By making the most of this opportunity, we can strengthen our communities with more investment, jobs and funding for critical services.

That’s true across all energy technologies, including oil and gas, hydrogen, carbon capture and advanced nuclear. But it’s especially true for renewable sources of energy like wind farms and solar arrays, which have found a natural home on the eastern plains of Colorado, where I’m from, and in many other rural areas across the western United States.

We have some barriers to overcome, however. The most talked about is the need for more long-distance power transmission lines to move all that electricity from the farming and ranching communities where it’s produced to the cities and suburbs where it’s consumed.

But expanding the amount of energy storage available to power grid operators is another major challenge that deserves more attention.

With more storage, electricity generated when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining doesn’t have to be used right away — it can be used at any hour of the day or night, regardless of weather conditions.

That’s good for the reliability of the power grid, but it’s also good for rural communities, because energy storage effectively grows the market for the electricity they produce.

For this reason, lawmakers and power grid regulators need to look at all the viable energy storage technologies — not just bigger versions of the lithium-ion batteries that currently power our phones, laptops and even electric cars.

One of the most promising of those technologies is called pumped hydro storage. It’s not a new technology, and despite all the attention given to lithium-ion batteries, pumped hydro storage provides more than 90% of the energy storage available on the U.S. power grid today.

According to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), pumped hydro storage is “a mature technology that includes pumping water from a lower reservoir to a higher one where it is stored until needed.”

When electricity from renewable sources is used to run those pumps, that renewable energy is stored. When the water is released, “it flows back down through a turbine and generates electricity,” according to PNNL.

Effectively, pumped hydro storage functions as a water-based battery, using technology that’s been around a lot longer than lithium-ion battery technology.

For this reason, pumped hydro is one of the lowest-cost technologies for energy storage. According to PNNL, once built, a pumped hydro storage facility can function for 60 years or more without the same kind of maintenance and repair costs that apply to electrochemical battery technologies like lithium-ion.

Just like the batteries in your cellphone, laptop or electric car must be reconditioned or replaced over time, so do the much larger batteries used to store electricity for the power grid — and that adds cost.

That’s not the case for pumped hydro storage. “It doesn’t degrade no matter how much you cycle it up and down,” Matthew Shapiro, the CEO of rPlus Hydro, said in an interview with The Western Way.

With 15 pumped storage projects in development across the U.S., officials at rPlus Hydro say their technology isn’t meant to directly compete with electrochemical batteries. In fact, rPlus Hydro’s parent company — rPlus Energies — builds solar arrays that are paired with battery-based storage systems.

It turns out lithium-ion batteries are good at storing and discharging electricity in short bursts, while pumped storage hydro can provide many more hours of backup power to the grid.

“It’s not an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamic,” Shapiro said. “Batteries are good for short durations of between two and four hours. Pumped storage typically works well over an eight-hour duration.”

Another cost-saving feature: pumped hydro storage doesn’t rely on the same supply chain as consumer electronics and electric cars. Though there are moves to reform project permitting and build more mines in America, the global supply of critical minerals needed for batteries and other low-carbon energy technologies is currently dominated by foreign nations, especially China.

Until that changes, “there’s a lot of concern about battery supply chains, especially with the growing appetite for electric vehicles in the automotive sector,” Shapiro said.

The lesson for lawmakers and regulators is clear: policies to expand energy storage can’t be solely focused on lithium-ion or other kinds of electrochemical battery technologies.

Reforms to speed up the permitting process and incentivize the construction of energy storage facilities must be applied broadly to include established technologies, including pumped hydro storage.

Chasing new technologies is all well and good. But for the sake of our energy security and the rural communities that make that security possible, we must not lose sight of the technologies we already have.

Greg Brophy, from Wray, is a farmer and former state senator. He is the Colorado director of The Western Way.

Record Geothermal Production at Fervo Energy’s Nevada Pilot Project

Today, geothermal energy startup Fervo Energy announced that it had successfully completed a well test at it’s Project Red pilot plant in Winnemucca, Nevada.  The successful test means that Fervo Energy is the first company to successfully drill a horizontal well pair for commercial geothermal production, achieving lateral lengths of 3,250 feet, reaching a temperature of 376 °F, and proving controlled flow through rigorous tracer testing.  

“By applying drilling technology from the oil and gas industry, we have proven that we can produce 24/7 carbon-free energy resources in new geographies across the world. The incredible results we share today are the product of many years of dedicated work and commitment from Fervo employees and industry partners, especially Google,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo Energy CEO and Co-Founder.

The successful well test confirms the commercial viability of Fervo’s drilling technology and establishes Project Red as the most productive enhanced geothermal system in history. The 30-day well test, a standard for geothermal, achieved a flowrate of 63 liters per second at high temperature that enables 3.5 MW of electric production, setting new records for both flow and power output from an enhanced geothermal system.

Fervo noted that the data collected during pilot will enable rapid advancement in geothermal deployment, with Fervo’s next horizontal well pair planned to achieve more than double the power output of the pilot design.

Fervo’s results from Project Red support the findings of the DOE Enhanced Geothermal Earthshot and show that geothermal energy could supply over 20% of U.S. power needs and compliment wind and solar to reach a fully decarbonized grid. Fervo’s drilling and well test results pave the way for the U.S. to meet this goal ahead of schedule; with Fervo’s breakthrough, no technological barriers to geothermal deployment remain.

Fervo Energy CEO Tim Latimer detailed the accomplishment and the work that led up to it via Twitter:

1/Today I am thrilled to announce, after years of work, our team @fervoenergy has developed a major advancement in geothermal, proven it at the field scale, and is set to deliver commercial next-gen geothermal decades ahead of schedule. THREAD. https://t.co/5TY16HU19F

— Tim Latimer (@TimMLatimer) July 18, 2023

Western Govs Release Geothermal Energy Report

The Western Governors’ Association released a new report, “The Heat Beneath Our Feet” which explores the opportunities to accelerate geothermal energy development and deployment across the West. Colorado Governor Jared Polis, the Chair of Western Governors’ Association focused on geothermal energy during his chairmanship over the last year. The report is a culmination of four workshops and six tours with input from the geothermal industry, policy makers, and other stakeholders.

The report’s recommendations to advance geothermal energy include:

• Improve resource assessment and data collection: Increasing federal funding for resource assessments, coordinating efforts to target areas with the greatest potential, improving the federal repository of data relevant to geothermal development, and leveraging data from the oil and gas industry, as well as new technology, will increase our understanding of subsurface resources and foster additional geothermal development.

• Mitigate risk in drilling and exploration: Risk and uncertainty contribute to relatively high up-front costs for geothermal development. Those costs can be abated by continuing federal investment to reduce uncertainty in geothermal exploration, exploring models to help developers secure financing for exploratory drilling and mitigate drilling risk, and extending existing tax incentives for the oil and gas industry to include geothermal development. • Optimize permitting and improve regulatory certainty: Permitting timelines can also be prohibitive for geothermal development. Lengthy delays can be mitigated by providing tools and resources to help stakeholders navigate the geothermal development process, increasing agency capacity for leasing and permitting, developing streamlined processes and categorical exclusions for geothermal leasing on par with other energy categories, expanding oil and gas exploration regulatory efficiencies to geothermal development, and collaborating with tribes and communities prior to and during project development. •

• Expand funding opportunities: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funding for demonstration projects and the Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) should be increased. Investment in energy transition communities should be encouraged.

• Implement incentives for consumer adoption: Expedite the deployment of tax incentives, rebates, and enduser applications to spur the adoption of geothermal heating and cooling.

• Develop workforce and contractor ecosystem: Geothermal energy can generate good jobs and create opportunities for workers and communities affected by the energy transition. Workforce development in the geothermal industry should be supported, including through the development of training and certification programs.

• Increase awareness and education to develop geothermal markets: Develop guidance for policymakers, regulators, and utilities to better promote geothermal energy.

How environmental groups fuel forest fires

This piece from TWW’s John Karakoulakis originally ran in the Washington Examiner on June 28, 2023 and can be accessed here.

The Rocky Mountain West has some of the most beautiful forests in the world. Whether you enjoy hiking, fishing, or simply admiring the views from afar, we’re lucky to have these majestic natural resources in our backyard.

But living in close connection with these forests also takes real work. Public forests , for example, are managed by dedicated state and federal agencies staffed with wildlife biologists, soil scientists, hydrologists, and other professionals.

Too often, their work is made much more difficult — if not impossible — by far-left environmental groups who use strategic lawsuits to prevent forest management activities from taking place. It’s time that elected officials in the nation’s capital put an end to these abusive lawsuits or, at a minimum, roll back some of the worst impacts.

It isn’t just about helping people, who radical environmentalists view as irredeemably bad. It’s also about helping the wildlife species that these groups claim they are trying to protect.

Here’s why: For forest managers, a big part of their job is keeping the ecosystem healthy while also making sure it’s safe for people to live near and visit. That job is harder than it sounds, especially in the West, because people have understandably chosen to limit the natural role that fire plays in maintaining balanced forest ecosystems.

Without natural fires, large amounts of undergrowth can build up. Over time, the stockpile of fuel grows to dangerous levels, and when there is a fire, it’s much larger and more damaging than it should be.

That isn’t just bad for the people living in nearby communities; it’s also bad for wildlife. Ecologists have found that when forests grow too tall and too thick due to decades of fire suppression, there aren’t enough smaller, younger plants to provide the kind of habitat that many species need.

“In today’s situation, if you look at these big panoramic landscapes, what you see is an incredibly lower level of diversity, where the forest has all grown up and blended,” Paul Hessburg, a research landscape ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, told Oregon Public Broadcasting back in 2018. “There are some critters still making a living in that landscape, but it has nowhere near the variety of the former landscape before it was homogenized.”

Small-scale, controlled burns are one tool that forest managers can use to mimic the role of natural fires. But mechanical thinning of the undergrowth, using everything from hand tools to rakes to chainsaws to wood chippers, is also a must, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Piling up brush, thinning dense stands of trees, and pruning lower branches are some of the ways forest managers reduce the risk of catastrophic fires and encourage the kind of new growth and restoration that benefits wildlife.

But a faction of the environmental movement finds this kind of human activity in forests to be unacceptable, and for decades, these activists have been waging war against forest managers in the courts.

Perhaps the worst example is the 2015 victory of the Cottonwood Environmental Law Center in front of the ultraliberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The decision allowed environmental groups to use the Endangered Species Act to derail existing forest management plans by forcing the federal government to go back and repeat years of consultation and desk work on those plans.

The Obama and Trump administrations worked with Congress to freeze the effect of the so-called Cottonwood decision, but that freeze recently expired. Today, there are 87 different forest management plans that could be brought to a halt by Cottonwood-style lawsuits, the U.S. Forest Service has warned .

On federal land alone, there is already an 80 million-acre backlog of forest ecosystems that need restoration work. The wildfire threat posed by this backlog has been called a “ crisis ” by the Biden administration, which is attempting to fast-track forest-thinning projects over the next decade.

But the Biden forest plan and other forest management proposals to reduce the backlog are now clouded in uncertainty because of the renewed threat of legal action.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) is leading a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers to fix this problem. “An immediate resolution to this decision is vital to allow land managers and wildlife biologists to follow the best available science to improve the health of our forests, reduce the risk of severe wildfires, advance wildlife habitat projects, and support good paying timber jobs,” Daines and his fellow lawmakers told the Biden administration earlier this year.

It’s hard to fathom how an idea with this much bipartisan support still struggles to get traction inside the Beltway. Regardless, it’s time for real leaders in both parties to come up with a permanent legislative fix to this problem.

For communities facing the growing threat of catastrophic wildfires, it truly is a matter of life and death.

John Karakoulakis is director of The Western Way, a nonprofit organization focused on free market solutions to Western U.S. conservation issues.