Yesterday I wrote about PJM and FERC’s public falling-out, and today’s feed is mostly the same story restated by people who didn’t want to be left out. So I went looking for the thing that wasn’t a fight, and found a rural hospital in Colorado.

It’s planning a $65 million addition. The original plan had full-building backup generators. Then somebody from a tax-credit consulting firm sat down with the construction team and did the arithmetic: about $13 million of the project goes to heating and cooling, and a big slice of that qualifies for 48E credits if you build it with combined heat and power, geothermal, solar and a battery. Somewhere between $4 and $8 million comes back. Generators don’t qualify, so the hospital is getting a small power plant mix instead.

I love this because nobody in the story is making a climate argument. The hospital isn’t. The consultant isn’t. The batteries are there to shift load onto cheaper rate periods, and the geothermal is there because it’s refundable. The transition is happening through a line item.

Which connects, a little sideways, to the grid utilization piece from the Utilize Coalition. We use roughly half the grid’s capacity, they say, and a 10% bump in utilization could save over $100 billion. Both the current and previous Energy Secretaries apparently like the idea. In a month where I’ve watched a federal court overrule an “emergency” and two judges restore Solar for All, a policy both parties will say yes to feels almost suspicious. Maybe it’s the usual story: agreement is easy when the idea mostly means doing the same thing with less steel.

Ameren Missouri’s 10.6 GW of gas in its 20-year plan sits right next to all this. Same day, same industry, two completely different theories of what a kilowatt-hour is for.


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