The glass-and-metal building that Solyndra began erecting alongside Interstate 880 in Fremont in September 2009 was something Silicon Valley hadn’t seen in years: a new factory.

It wasn’t just any factory. When it was completed at an estimated cost of $733 million, including proceeds from a $535 million U.S. loan guarantee, it covered 300,000 square feet, the equivalent of five football fields. It had robots that whistled Disney tunes, spa-like showers with liquid-crystal displays of the water temperature, and glass-walled conference rooms.

“The new building is like the Taj Mahal,” said John Pierce, 54, a San Jose resident who worked as a facilities manager at Solyndra.

We also found that the Department’s due diligence efforts were less than fully effective. At various points during the loan guarantee process, Solyndra officials provided certain information to the Department that, had it been considered more closely, would have cast doubt on the accuracy of certain of Solyndra’s prior representations. In these instances, the Department missed opportunities to detect and resolve indicators that portions of the data provided by Solyndra were unreliable. In the end, however, the actions of the Solyndra officials were at the heart of this matter, and they effectively undermined the Department’s efforts to manage the loan guarantee process. In so doing, they placed more than $500 million in U.S. taxpayers’ funds in jeopardy. 

While not the focus of the investigation, we were mindful of the concerns that had been raised regarding possible political pressure applied in the Solyndra decision-making process. Employees acknowledged that they felt tremendous pressure, in general, to process loan guarantee applications. They suggested the pressure was based on the significant interest in the program from Department leadership, the Administration, Congress, and the applicants.

Based on my experience as a state regulator with IRPs and computer models purporting to predict the future two or more decades down the road, I regard 20-year projections of this sort as, at best, occasionally interesting, but they certainly provide no basis whatsoever for saddling consumers with the costs of a billion-dollar transmission line.

AFUDC is booked during the pre-service phases, but cannot be recovered from customers until the project is completed and actually serving customers, i.e., “used and useful.”  The NOPR proposal is simply in keeping with traditional good utility ratemaking principles.  Booking these costs as AFUDC also recognizes the reality that just because an LTRT project is selected for a regional plan, it still has to obtain all state siting, certificate of public convenience and necessity  and other, including environmental, approvals, and survive what may be the subsequent litigation, before it is actually built.

PSC spokesperson Matthew Sweeney said the commission “has unique obligations and could have different interests and duties relating to transparency than former Commissioner Huebsch would have in his capacity as a private citizen,” which could have created a conflict of interest for PSC attorneys.

Huebsch, a former state legislator who served in Gov. Scott Walker’s cabinet before joining the PSC in 2015, says the messages were purely personal exchanges with old friends and that he never discussed PSC business outside of official proceedings.

Regardless of the results of the litigation the governmental unit, if it does not provide legal counsel to the defendant officer or employee, shall pay reasonable attorney fees and costs of defending the action, unless it is found by the court or jury that the defendant officer or employee did not act within the scope of employment.

The public service commission is authorized by s. 196.85, Stats., to charge any public utility, power district, or sewerage system the expenses attributable to the performance of the commission's duties.

Through his attorney, Huebsch blamed the plaintiffs for running up the tab on utility customers who will ultimately absorb the costs of defending the PSC’s decisions.

“The best outcome for ratepayers in Wisconsin and across the country would be for this unfounded ‘bias’ claim to be dismissed as soon as possible,” Huebsch said. “Every dime they have had to pay until now — including for the co-owners’ numerous law firms and PSC legal staff — is because of the plaintiffs and their choices.”

Huebsch said if the Supreme Court doesn’t throw out the bias claim, ratepayers will end up paying to litigate an “untold number of copycat ‘bias’ lawsuits.”

Invenergy spokesman Patrick Whitty slammed the House bill, calling it “an astonishing move in the wrong direction” at a time when global energy is in a security crisis.

“Among its many other impacts, the bill would unconstitutionally and retroactively kill Missouri’s largest energy infrastructure project, the Grain Belt Express, a project essential to American energy security that will connect millions of consumers to domestically produced, affordable, and reliable clean energy,” Whitty said. “The energy from the Grain Belt Express is the equivalent of 15 million barrels of oil annually, produced and delivered right here in the Midwest.”

The Missouri Supreme Court earlier ruled that Grain Belt be granted public utility status because the $2.3 billion project is in the public interest.

The project also has garnered the support of Sen. Bill White, R-Joplin, who says it will invest millions of dollars in the state’s rural areas, boost the local energy supply and help ensure energy independence.

White said Monday he had not yet reviewed the latest House bill, which moved out of the House last week on a 102-41 vote. But, he said retroactively targeting the company after it has already started buying land would be unconstitutional.

Labor unions, environmental groups and the Missouri Association of Municipal Utilities oppose the changes.

Jake Hummel, a former state senator from St. Louis who now oversees the Missouri AFL-CIO, said the project will create jobs as it crosses the property of 570 landowners in eight northern counties.
“The quest for American-made energy, while creating 1,500 Missouri jobs, is an opportunity our state cannot afford to pass up,” Hummel said.

Michael Berg of the Sierra Club’s Missouri chapter said the legislation is short-sighted in a time when energy production is evolving.
“More legal barriers for wind energy transmission give an unfair advantage to the highly polluting fossil fuel industry,” Berg told members of the House Judiciary Committee.
In addition, Berg said more than a dozen communities have signed up to purchase power from the line, including Kirkwood, Columbia, Hannibal and Farmington.
“The power delivered along this line is expected to save dozens of rural Missouri communities more than $12 million annually,” Berg said.
As an added benefit, Invenergy says it will use the power lines to also offer broadband service that could bring improved internet to over one million rural Missourians, including 250,000 within 50 miles of the transmission line.

Any electric utility subject to the regulation of the state corporation commission pursuant to K.S.A. 66-101, and amendments thereto, may seek to recover costs associated with transmission of electric power, in a manner consistent with the determination of transmission-related costs from an order of a regulatory authority having legal jurisdiction, through a separate transmission delivery charge included in customers' bills.

Company shall collect from applicable customers a Transmission Delivery Charge (TDC) based on its annual transmission revenue requirement (ATRR) for costs to be recovered under the following schedules of the Open Access Transmission Tariff for Service Offered by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) for service to Company’s retail KCC-Jurisdictional customers.

The TDC Unit Charges included on the following sheets are designed to recover the retail transmission revenue requirement. The Company shall file to adjust TDC Unit Charges to reflect and track changes in FERC-approved rates for charges included in the ATRR according to the terms of this rate schedule.

The Commission’s incentive policies— particularly the CWIP Incentive, which allows recovery of costs before a project has been put into service—run the risk of making consumers “the bank” for the transmission developer; but, unlike a real bank, which gets to charge interest for the money it loans, under our existing incentives policies the consumer not only effectively “loans” the money through the formula rates mechanism, but also pays the utility a profit, known as Return on Equity, or “ROE,” for the privilege of serving as the utility’s de facto lender. There is something wrong with this picture.

Some communities are pushing back on the idea of agricultural land and other places being used for large scale wind and solar farms.

Biden asked what the electric companies are hearing on those types of arguments, using the opportunity to also take a swipe at former President Trump, who claimed in 2019 that wind turbine noise causes cancer.

“Generic question: Are you getting less resistance when you talk about wind and windmills? I know they cause cancer,” he said, drawing laughter from the room. Experts have debunked that claim.

“Bad joke,” Biden said.

“The tax credits will make more sophisticated energy infrastructure much less expensive,” said Pat Vincent-Collawn, CEO of New Mexico-based PNM Resources Inc.

An aggressive clean energy transition will be a pricey one, especially for the electricity industry, which is among the most capital-intensive sectors in the United States. The industry collectively spent $143.3 billion in capital expenditures in 2021, EEI said.

Regulated electric companies are allowed to recoup investments from customers, plus earn a profit. That is a key reason why electric companies are pushing Congress to pass these tax credits: It softens the blow to consumers, who eventually will pay for the transmission lines, solar arrays and wind farms.

“Those benefits actually flow through to our customers and the economy,” Akins of AEP said at the White House.

Prior to the event, EEI executives briefed Wall Street investors and analysts at the Nasdaq MarketSite.
There, Brian Wolff, EEI’s chief strategy officer, gave a nod to the meeting with Biden and doubled down on the electric companies’ efforts to ensure those tax credit proposals become law.

Akins said the plan to add renewables presents an opportunity to work with unions and to save customers billions of dollars. The challenge is siting and building transmission to support all of those renewables, he said.

“For us, it’s important to scope those projects,” he said. “The savings associated with the renewables will help us with the transition.”

The DOJ complaint and audit staff’s discussions on internal controls during onsite interviews of FESC employees raised audit staff’s concerns about the existence of significant shortcomings in FirstEnergy and its subsidiary companies’ controls over financial reporting, including controls over accounting for the costs of civic, political, and related activities, such as lobbying activities, performed by and on behalf of FirstEnergy and its subsidiaries. Moreover, these controls may have been circumvented in ways designed to conceal the nature and purpose of expenditures made and, as a result, that led to the improper inclusion of lobbying and other nonutility costs in wholesale rate determinations.

Even more concerning, several factual assertions agreed to by FirstEnergy in DPA and the remedies FirstEnergy agreed to undertake, point towards internal controls having been possibly obfuscated or circumvented to conceal or mislead as to the actual amounts, nature, and purpose of the lobbying expenditures made, and as a result, the improper inclusion of lobbying and other nonutility costs in wholesale transmission billing rates.

Are we not doing an adequate job of incorporating the input of all stakeholders or resolving major conflict during the development stage? If parties remain opposed to a project after a final decision is made, have we reached a time in our society that the risk of proceeding with a project may be too great even if an approval has been granted? In the project sited above (NECEC), the primary benefits appear to accrue to one state and most opposition as well as the agency suspending construction are from another. In fact, the issue on the ballot in the opposing state, which could permanently enjoin the project under construction, supports local transmission while increasing the difficulty of gaining approval for EHV and DC transmission that does not directly benefit the local communities it impacts.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (the Act) passed in November 2021 grants FERC broader transmission siting authority within national interest transmission corridors and allows the DOE to become an anchor tenant for new transmission projects.

Frankly, we do not know if the Act will help get new transmission built. Unquestionably, it has never been more difficult to obtain consensus regarding major new long distance, interstate, and international transmission projects. Such projects should be designed to deliver demonstrable benefits outweighing the impacts for all affected parties.

Transmission developers may need to borrow from other energy business segments to provide compelling economic strategies for landowners, host communities and other stakeholders to support new projects. The outright purchase of the required land for a project as opposed to a one-time purchase of a ROW is one example utilities have employed. Offering a production-based payment to landowners and providing a community stipend or other benefits has proven successful in the gas exploration and wind industries. Applying these methods to transmission projects would ensure those living with the project will receive continuing tangible benefits.

The power industry is operating in a new era of public activism complicated by policy driven as opposed to strictly need based infrastructure development goals. Successful future projects will require in depth collaboration to get all stakeholders on board and rowing in the same direction.