A recent study shows Maryland's electric grid is well positioned to manage the transition to electrification as outlined in the state's climate goals.

In the 2022 Climate Solutions Now Act, the state pledged to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045.

The act also directed the Public Service Commission to study energy production and distribution capacity to determine if the transition away from fossil fuels for space and water heating would strain the grid.

The report assessed the impact by looking at three different electrification scenarios, and estimated demand growth would be at most just over 2% per year between now and 2031.

Lead study author Sanem Sergici, Ph.D. - the principal at the The Brattle Group - said these peak demand scenarios appear modest next to growth rates seen in the past.

"We think that this will be quite manageable, especially if you compare it to the growth that Maryland's system has experienced in the past," said Sergici. "We looked back 40 years, and we have seen periods in which Maryland peak demand has grown at 4%, 5%."

She said utilities were able to increase capacity in the 1980s without large price hikes to ratepayers.

Electricity demand currently peaks in the summer, but the report anticipates the electrification of heating will cause a switch to winter peaking by the end of 2027.

The study focused on electrification in residential single and multifamily housing and large office buildings.

Assuming the widespread adoption of heat pumps in coming years, the study looked at three scenarios in which backups for the coldest hours of the year are maintained.

Scenario 1 assumes the continued use of heating oil or propane as backup, and would result in the smallest increase in load demand per year at just over 0.5%.

Scenario 2 posits the use of cold-climate heat pumps, which do not require backup - their impact on demand is just over 1% per year.

Continued use of baseboard heating is assumed in scenario 3 and would increase demand just over 2%. The report looked at the system as a whole and does not say when and where upgrades will be needed.

Sergici said the study conclusions do not mean no investment will be necessary.

"Even though this is manageable at the system level," said Sergici, "utilities should be doing their own detailed and very granular distribution planning studies to figure out where they will need to expand the capacity of the grid early on, so that they can get ahead of some of those challenging problems. "

The report also says that with more energy-efficiency and load-flexibility incentives, the state could see reductions in demand of as much as 1% per year, offsetting at least part of the load growth from electrification.




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By Eric Wesoff for Canary Media.
Broadcast version by Judith Ruiz-Branch for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Since its founding back in 2010, Shine Technologies has raised nearly $800 million to deliver on the potential of generating cheap, abundant energy from fusion.

Like the dozens of other startups at work in this field, Shine Technologies has yet to crack the code on fusion, an energy source that has been 40 years away from commercialization for 50 years. But unlike those competitors, Shine is already generating real revenue — not by producing electricity but by essentially selling neutrons from the fusion reaction to industrial imaging and materials testing companies.

Governments, venture capitalists, tech billionaires, and other private investors around the world have pumped more than $7.1 billion into fusion companies, according to a July 2024 report by the Fusion Industry Association.

But despite almost a century of research since fusion’s discovery, engineers have been unable to achieve its holy grail: continuously generating more power than was used to create a fusion reaction in the first place. The fusion world uses a metric called the fusion energy gain factor, also known simply as Q, to measure that ratio. If a project was to achieve a Q greater than 1, it would achieve the much-sought-after energy-breakeven point.

But Shine has a different benchmark — at least for right now.

“If you talk to almost every fusion company on Earth, they’ll say, ‘We’re shooting for Q greater than 1.’ But we have a different Q — our Q is economic. It’s generating more dollars out than dollars in. That’s how you scale a company,” Greg Piefer, Shine’s CEO, said.

A different kind of fusion company 

The fusion reaction is the primordial alchemical trick that powers our sun, propels spacecraft in science-fiction novels and, if the visionaries and true believers are correct, could meet humanity’s voracious energy needs in the centuries to come.

The reaction occurs in plasma, the fourth state of matter. The sun creates plasma by compressing and heating hydrogen to tens of millions of degrees, and it performs the miracle of fusion by confining that hydrogen, along with its variants, with its mammoth gravity.

Humans hoping to recreate the conditions of the sun on Earth have to rely on exotic magnets, Brobdingnagian laser-beam arrays, or other maximalist techniques.

These complex and expensive fusion machines compress and confine plasma in an attempt to bring two nuclei close enough to overcome their repellant electrostatic forces and fuse together. A successful, sustained fusion reaction would heat up a material surrounding the reactor, allowing it to boil water and drive the same sort of conventional steam turbine you’d find in a coal, gas, or traditional nuclear (fission) power plant.

Most of the fusion startups Canary Media has covered — such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, Avalanche Energy, and Zap Energy — plan to take this steam-turbine approach to producing fusion power. Each company has its own (unproven) method for controlling the plasma and wringing out the heat. Some firms use a tokamak design, a very big, hollow donut-shaped hall in which the plasma circulates, or a twisted variant called a stellarator. Some aspirants confine the plasma with magnetic forces while others use high electrical currents or lasers to tame the atomic-particle soup.

So, which technology and approach is Shine using to solve the fusion riddle?

“I’m going to say something really trippy. As a fusion company, when it comes to energy production — I don’t know yet. … We have our own internal technological approach. I don’t think it’s any more likely than any other technological approach to prevail,” Piefer admitted. “You won’t hear that from any other fusion CEO in the whole world. But the truth is, it’s early innings, and we don’t know which fusion approach is going to be the most cost-effective.”

And while today’s cadre of fusion startups aims to provide power to the electrical grid in the 2030s or 2040s, Shine is following a different path to market.

“Fusion-energy people are trying to go from fusion not really having ever been used commercially for anything to it being the most reliable, cheapest form of generating energy,” said Piefer. “Everyone’s chasing the energy.”

Instead, Shine’s CEO wants his firm to scale the way historic deep-tech companies like semiconductor makers have done: “You start small with a market where you can make money right away, and then you iterate over time — and through that virtuous cycle of providing value and reinvesting a portion of it to make the technology better, you continue to access bigger and bigger markets.”

The market where Shine is making money now is the sale of neutrons for use in industrial imaging and materials testing. Piefer estimates that this will generate “on the order of $50 million of revenue in 2025.”

Shine will next move into medical-isotope production, then recycling spent nuclear fuel, and, ultimately, Piefer said, electrical power generation.

Producing medical isotopes requires fewer sustained reactions than producing power, and while net power is a ways away, the technology for isotope production is already available.

Medical isotopes are currently produced via nuclear fission, but if they can be produced via fusion, that would eliminate the need to use highly enriched uranium. And it could be a lucrative line of business: The global market for medical isotopes is about $6 billion a year.

“If you make a kilowatt-hour of fusion energy, you can sell that kilowatt-hour for maybe 5 cents,” he said. “But you can sell the other product of [deuterium-tritium] fusion reactions, neutrons, for as much as $100,000 per kilowatt-hour in certain markets.”

The prospect of getting a foot in that market drove Shine to break ground on a new facility in Wisconsin, which has already been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It will be the largest isotope-production factory in the world when it comes online in a few years, according to Piefer. He claims that his firm is the only one that has successfully shepherded a new nuclear technology through the NRC process since the agency’s inception in 1974. The firm has also received tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to support its isotope-production plans, including $32 million last summer.

Unlike the rest of the fusion-startup cohort, “we’re actually selling fusion,” the CEO said. “That’s an important differentiation because it means we get to practice fusion, which is ultimately what’s going to drive it to be cheaper” — and potentially pave the way for it to become a power source in the decades to come.


Eric Wesoff wrote this article for Canary Media.


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This article was produced by Resource Rural.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Kentucky News Connection reporting for the Resource Rural-Public News Service Collaboration

Anna Carey jokes that she might like animals more than people, depending on the person. Her affinity for four-legged companions has kept her involved as special projects manager for the Leslie County Fiscal Court, the region’s municipal government that also manages the community animal shelter.

After experiencing an animal overpopulation boom following the pandemic, the rural shelter enclosed an outdoor slab to create more usable space for the dogs and cats they house. That part of the shelter, as well as the lighting throughout the facility — were ripe for efficiency upgrades. Since the county faces an increasingly tight budget, Carey said it made sense to find ways to save money wherever possible.

When she was approached by the Mountain Association about a grant opportunity that would allow the county to install solar panels on the shelter at a fraction of the full-price cost, and save money on future energy costs, she proceeded without hesitation. Carey worked with them as well as The Nature Conservancy and the Appalachian Solar Finance Fund to secure grant funding that collectively totaled more than $90,000 for the $112,000 project. The Leslie County Fiscal Court only had to contribute $20,000.

The county will also be able to obtain a tax credit from the federal government for this project, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, making the final project cost for the county essentially zero. 

“It just makes economic sense for the county,” Carey said about the minimal contribution the county would have to make. “It would decrease their bills and we could hook it up to batteries. And it would offer more long-term resiliency.”

“It’s a very clear savings. We’re in the final stages of it and the installer said that he can already see the consumption we need from the power company is going way down,” Carey said, noting that the Mountain Association helped them “basically do everything” throughout the process.

The solar installer programmed the system to switch from grid usage to battery usage during peak periods of energy consumption. With this feature the shelter can avoid being charged higher demand rates from the utility company. The shelter expects to save $5,000 in electricity costs annually.

“That’s super smart,” Carey said. “When they’re charging us the most, we can use the sun.”

Carey says that one of the most gratifying elements of the solar installation is the fact that the county’s financial contribution to the project came from coal severance funds. Those funds are accrued through taxes imposed on coal mining.

Historically Leslie County’s economy was fueled by coal. In a community that once relied so heavily on the coal industry, clean energy can be a touchy subject. Carey thinks that once people see how much money the county saves that it can put into other things for the community that this solar project and any that come in the future will be readily welcomed. It’s also an example of how the region can continue its legacy of energy production and one more way historic coal revenue contributes to its continued energy security today. 

She also appreciates that this solar installation was an example of the county testing a new solution. The cost to the county was low, the benefits and savings could be significant, and it could end up being a case study for the county on reducing costs elsewhere at other municipal buildings. 

“We’re lucky. I don’t know how we got so lucky,” Carey said of receiving the grant funding. “It’s the fiscal court’s job to be fiscally responsible. So, we’re doing our job. Sometimes it’s that simple.”


This article was produced by Resource Rural.

Wisconsin's largest utility provider is seeking approval for a new gas plant to help meet growing electricity demand, but a new report argues there are better ways to create a more reliable energy grid.

Data centers are among the many reasons there is added pressure on the nation's power grid. The nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation said it has set off panic, with talk of slowing the pace of coal plant closures and spurring new natural gas plant development.

Sara Baldwin, senior director for electrification at Energy Innovation, hopes decisionmakers do not suddenly abandon the transition to renewables.

"The report points to the fact that wind and solar and battery prices have all come down substantially over the last few years," Baldwin pointed out. "And in many cases, have exceeded the forecast for their cost declines."

Natural gas burns cleaner than other fossil fuels, but the authors said quickly pivoting to gas now would result in too many long-term costs. Baldwin acknowledged wind and solar will not do it alone, but using a range of renewables, along with low-risk supplemental sources, aids reliability. The company We Energies said its proposed plant in Kenosha County is part of a long-term vision, including renewables and the end of coal use.

One supplemental energy source the report recommends is better management of the power already being generated, incentivizing people to adjust their energy use during peak times. Researchers recognize it might be hard to motivate enough people to sign on. While there is not a clear consensus about how to move forward, Baldwin noted the news isn't all that bad.

"We are not in an energy emergency," Baldwin said. "We actually have time to do this in a very pragmatic and thoughtful way and avoid some of the fearmongering that we see right now."

She added grid operators and utilities would be well served to help dispel long-standing myths about renewables. Baldwin thinks they should also remain focused on removing barriers to plugging clean energy sources into the grid, noting there is still a backlog of development ready to power up homes and businesses.

As for the We Energies proposal, state regulators could decide its fate in the coming months.


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