Given Detailed Analysis, Grids Can Host The Most Solar
Originally published at ILSR.org
Electricity customers are lining up to generate their own clean, affordable solar energy, but to get it to them, solar developers must navigate the impediments of a congested and outdated electricity grid.
For this episode of the Local Energy Rules podcast, host John Farrell speaks with Yochi Zakai, attorney with Shute, Mahaly, and Weinberger representing Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). The two discuss hosting capacity analysis and how publicly shared grid information can help solar developers, electric customers, and others make more informed decisions.
Listen to the full episode and explore more resources below — including a transcript and summary of the conversation.
Episode Transcript
Expensive Electric Accommodations
Electric distribution grids were built as top-down avenues for delivering electricity from large, centralized power plants. Now, as distributed generation and energy storage become more popular, utilities are having to accommodate the two-way flow of electricity. To do so, the utility often needs to upgrade the distribution system. This is especially true in areas where there is a lot of distributed energy development.
“The grid was built for this one way flow of electricity. But as more customers decide to install generation in their homes, the way that the distribution grid operates is also going to change.”
Solar developers looking to connect their new generation source to the grid may trigger the need for a system upgrade. In most cases, whoever triggers a grid upgrade must pay the upgrade costs — which can be severe. Larger solar gardens are more likely to trigger upgrades. If a developer is surprised by these costs, and building their solar garden is no longer feasible, they may be forced to drop their plans entirely. Hosting capacity analysis can provide key grid information proactively for individuals hoping to plug in.
Hosting Capacity Analysis
In a hosting capacity analysis, utilities compile information about the electric grid and publish it online for the use of developers and other stakeholders. The resulting map has pop-ups with data on various localized grid conditions: how much generating capacity that section of the grid can still handle, the voltage of the line, and the existing generation on that part of the grid.
This information, which Zakai calls “geeky grid data,” helps customers and solar developers make decisions.
“The studies produce a wealth of information that developers can use to cite and design the systems so they don’t trigger upgrades. And in some cases they can even make the grid more reliable.”
Utilities in seven states are required to publish hosting capacity maps. Some utilities even publish this information voluntarily. Zakai says that generally, hosting capacity analysis is most common in states with robust distributed energy development, including Hawaii, Massachusetts, and New York.
Some Truth to California Exceptionalism
California’s hosting capacity analysis process, called integration capacity analysis, provides more useful information than the hosting capacity maps published in other states. This is thanks, in part, to a petition from Zakai and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). IREC asked the state of California to consider all kinds of interconnecting loads, including electric vehicle chargers, electric heat, and solar generating power, when implementing its integration capacity analysis. In January 2021, the California commission filed its petition to make changes to the analysis and its resulting map.
In California, grid users also uniquely share the cost of grid upgrades, rather than the typical ‘cost-causer pays’ model used in other states.
Automating & Simplifying the Interconnection Process
It is not possible to automate all new grid interconnections, says Zakai. Still, hosting capacity analysis could simplify many of the steps within this process. California is the first state in the country to try using hosting capacity analysis to reduce the complexity of the interconnection process.
“Hosting capacity analysis can be used to automate and increase the precision of some of the most problematic technical review processes that the utilities use when they evaluate new grid connections. Last fall, California became the first state in the country to make a final decision to use the hosting capacity analysis to automate some of these processes.”
Thanks to new rules adopted by the California Public Utilities Commission, solar developers can use the public hosting capacity maps to design and site projects with more certainty. As developers make more informed proposals, utilities will not waste resources reviewing projects that will never get built.
Read ILSR’s comments to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission detailing how Hosting Capacity Analysis Could Simplify Grid Interconnection for Distributed Energy Resources.
Episode Notes
See these resources for more behind the story:
For concrete examples of how cities can take action toward gaining more control over their clean energy future, explore ILSR’s Community Power Toolkit.
Explore local and state policies and programs that help advance clean energy goals across the country, using ILSR’s interactive Community Power Map.
This is episode 135 of Local Energy Rules, an ILSR podcast with Energy Democracy Director John Farrell, which shares powerful stories of successful local renewable energy and exposes the policy and practical barriers to its expansion.
Local Energy Rules is Produced by ILSR’s John Farrell and Maria McCoy. Audio engineering for this episode is by Drew Birschbach.
This article originally posted at ilsr.org. For timely updates, follow John Farrell on Twitter, our energy work on Facebook, or sign up to get the Energy Democracy weekly update.
The electric box van experts at Harbinger announced a new, EREV version of their medium-duty van that pairs a big battery with a small, gas-powered ICE engine to offer fleets that are hesitant to electrify a massive 500 miles of autonomy on a single charge + tank.
The American truck brand is putting its latest $100 million raise to good use, developing a cost-competitive EREV chassis that marries a low-emissions 1.4L inline four-cylinder gas engine with a close coupled 800V generator sending power to a 140 or 175 kW battery for up to 500 miles of fully loaded range. More than enough, in other words, to meet the needs of just about any fleet you can think of.
That’s a good thing, too, because medium-duty trucks are put to work in just about any circumstance you can think of, as well – a fact that’s not lost on Harbinger.
“Medium-duty vehicles serve an incredibly diverse range of applications, just like the fleets and operators that rely on them, ” explains John Harris, Co-founder and CEO, Harbinger. “There are some fleets whose needs simply can’t be met with a purely electric vehicle—and we recognize that. Our hybrid is designed for use cases and routes that go beyond what an all-electric system typically supports. The series hybrid delivers the benefits of an electric drivetrain, along with the added confidence of a range extender when needed.”
In addition an up-front cost that should make it an attractive prospect for fleet buyers, the new Harbinger EREV pack performance that should made it attractive for its drivers, too. The new chassis’ electric powertrain delivers 440 hp and 1,140 lb-ft of tq for quick acceleration into traffic and smooth running, even under load. Charging performance is also quick, with the ability to get the big battery from 10-80% charge in just under an hour on a 150 kW port.
You’ve heard all this before
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. This medium-duty chassis was first shown last year, making its debut under a Thor Class A motorhome concept that we covered in September. That vehicle promised the same great EREV range and capability to a market that values independence and spontaneity more than most, and bringing those values to a medium-duty commercial market that’s lapping up “messy middle” propaganda from Shell NACFE is just smart business.
The new Harbinger chassis’ batteries are manufactured by Panasonic. No word on who is making the 1.4L ICE generator, but my money’s on the GM SGE four-cylinder last seen in the gas-powered Chevy Spark. You guys are smart, though – if you have a better guess who the supplier might be, let us know in the comments.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Harbinger.
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Environment
Trump wants coal to power AI data centers. The tech industry may need to make peace with that for now
President Donald Trump wants to revive the struggling coal industry in the U.S. by deploying plants to power the data centers that the Big Tech companies are building to train artificial intelligence.
Trump issued an executive order in April that directed his Cabinet to find areas of the U.S. where coal-powered infrastructure is available to support AI data centers and determine whether the infrastructure can be expanded to meet the growing electricity demand from the nation’s tech sector.
Trump has repeatedly promoted coal as power source for data centers. The president told the World Economic Forum in January that he would approve power plants for AI through emergency declaration, calling on the tech companies to use coal as a backup power source.
“They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup — good, clean coal,” the president said.
Trump’s push to deploy coal runs afoul of the tech companies’ environmental goals. In the short-term, the industry’s power needs may inadvertently be extending the life of existing coal plants.
Coal produces more carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt hour of power than any other energy source in the U.S. with the exception of oil, according to the Energy Information Administration. The tech industry has invested billions of dollars to expand renewable energy and is increasingly turning to nuclear power as a way to meet its growing electricity demand while trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that fuel climate change.
For coal miners, Trump’s push is a potential lifeline. The industry has been in decline as coal plants are being retired in the U.S. About 16% of U.S. electricity generation came from burning coal in 2023, down from 51% in 2001, according to EIA data.
Peabody Energy CEO James Grech, who attended Trump’s executive order ceremony at the White House, said “coal plants can shoulder a heavier load of meeting U.S. generation demands, including multiple years of data center growth.” Peabody is one of the largest coal producers in the U.S.
Grech said coal plants should ramp up how much power they dispatch. The nation’s coal fleet is dispatching about 42% of its maximum capacity right now, compared to a historical average of 72%, the CEO told analysts on the company’s May 6 earnings call.
“We believe that all coal-powered generators need to defer U.S. coal plant retirements as the situation on the ground has clearly changed,” Grech said. “We believe generators should un-retire coal plants that have recently been mothballed.”
Tech sector reaction
There is a growing acknowledgment within the tech industry that fossil fuel generation will be needed to help meet the electricity demand from AI. But the focus is on natural gas, which emits less half the CO2 of coal per kilowatt hour of power, according the the EIA.
“To have the energy we need for the grid, it’s going to take an all of the above approach for a period of time,” Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, said during a panel discussion at conference of tech and oil and gas executives in Oklahoma City last month.
“We’re not surprised by the fact that we’re going to need to add some thermal generation to meet the needs in the short term,” Miller said.
Thermal generation is a code word for gas, said Nat Sahlstrom, chief energy officer at Tract, a Denver-based company that secures land, infrastructure and power resources for data centers. Sahlstrom previously led Amazon’s energy, water and sustainability teams.
Executives at Amazon, Nvidia and Anthropic would not commit to using coal, mostly dodging the question when asked during the panel at the Oklahoma City conference.
“It’s never a simple answer,” Amazon’s Miller said. “It is a combination of where’s the energy available, what are other alternatives.”
Nvidia is able to be agnostic about what type of power is used because of the position the chipmaker occupies on the AI value chain, said Josh Parker, the company’s senior director of corporate sustainability. “Thankfully, we leave most of those decisions up to our customers.”
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said there are a broader set of options available than just coal. “We would certainly consider it but I don’t know if I’d say it’s at the top of our list.”
Sahlstrom said Trump’s executive order seems like a “dog whistle” to coal mining constituents. There is a big difference between looking at existing infrastructure and “actually building new power plants that are cost competitive and are going to be existing 30 to 40 years from now,” the Tract executive said.
Coal is being displaced by renewables, natural gas and existing nuclear as coal plants face increasingly difficult economics, Sahlstrom said. “Coal has kind of found itself without a job,” he said.
“I do not see the hyperscale community going out and signing long term commitments for new coal plants,” the former Amazon executive said. (The tech companies ramping up AI are frequently referred to as “hyperscalers.”)
“I would be shocked if I saw something like that happen,” Sahlstrom said.
Coal retirements strain grid
But coal plant retirements are creating a real challenge for the grid as electricity demand is increasing due to data centers, re-industrialization and the broader electrification of the economy.
The largest grid in the nation, the PJM Interconnection, has forecast electricity demand could surge 40% by 2039. PJM warned in 2023 that 40 gigawatts of existing power generation, mostly coal, is at risk of retirement by 2030, which represents about 21% of PJM’s installed capacity.
Data centers will temporarily prolong coal demand as utilities scramble to maintain grid reliability, delaying their decarbonization goals, according to a Moody’s report from last October. Utilities have already postponed the retirement of coal plants totaling about 39 gigawatts of power, according to data from the National Mining Association.
“If we want to grow America’s electricity production meaningfully over the next five or ten years, we [have] got to stop closing coal plants,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC’s “Money Movers” last month.
But natural gas and renewables are the future, Sahlstrom said. Some 60% of the power sector’s emissions reductions over the past 20 years are due to gas displacing coal, with the remainder coming from renewables, Sahlstrom said.
“That’s a pretty powerful combination, and it’s hard for me to see people going backwards by putting more coal into the mix, particularly if you’re a hyperscale customer who has net-zero carbon goals,” he said.
A federal court judge in Michigan has placed the once-promising electric truck brand Bollinger Motors’ assets into receivership following claims that the company’s owners still owe its founder, Robert Bollinger, more than $10 million.
Bollinger Motors first came to fame in the “draw a truck, get a billion dollars” stage of the EV revolution that saw Nikola rise to a higher market cap than Ford for a brief time. Robert Bollinger wasn’t able to capitalize quickly enough to get his trucks into production, though – and a late stage pivot to sell the brand to Mullen Automotive and launch a medium-duty commercial truck doesn’t appear to have been enough to save it.
Now, Automotive News is reporting on some of the more convoluted details of the Mullen purchase deal, with Robert (for ease of distinguishing the man from the brand) claiming that Mullen Automotive owes him more than $10 million for a loan he made to the company in 2024.
Just how Robert ended up giving Mullen Automotive $10 million to take his eponymous truck brand off his hands is probably one of those capitalistic mysteries that I’ll never understand, but Mullen’s response was perfectly clear: they didn’t even bother to show up to court.
Bollinger claims that at least two suppliers are also suing Mullen for unpaid debts. As such, the Honorable Terrence G. Berg has put the Bollinger brand into receivership, and its assets have been frozen in preparation for everything being liquidated. Worse, for Bollinger, the official court filings reveal a company that is really very much doing not awesome:
The testimony and evidence—which Defendant’s counsel conceded accurately reflected Defendant’s finances—showed that Defendant is in crisis. For months Defendant has owed more than twenty million dollars to suppliers, contractors, service providers, and owners of physical space. These debts are owed to parties who are critical for Defendant’s functioning. CEO Bryan Chambers testified that Defendant was locked out of its production facilities on May 5, 2025, and that the owner of the production facilities was seeking to permanently evict Defendant. The Court heard that Defendant had been prevented from accessing its critical manufacturing accounting system for a short time at the end of April 2025, before making a partial payment to restart services.
US DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
I’m not sure if you caught all that, but Bollinger’s CEO has been locked out the company’s facilities and getting evicted, the company is more than $20 million in debt, and that debt is owed to people Bollinger absolutely needs in order to keep going.
You can read the full court decision, which I’ve embedded here, below. Once you’ve taken it all in, feel free to rush into the comments to say you told me so, since I really thought hoped the Bollinger B1 had a shot. Silly me.
Bollinger v. Bollinger case
SOURCES: Automotive News, Justia, Yahoo!.
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