Joseph Krist

Publisher

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

A Florida jury last week found that flaws in Tesla’s self-driving software were partly to blame for a crash that killed a 22-year-old woman in 2019 and severely injured her boyfriend. The jury verdict, if upheld on appeal, would require Tesla to pay as much as $243 million in punitive and compensatory damages. The jury found that Tesla bore 33 percent responsibility for the crash, and blamed the driver

for the remainder. 

The trial, in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami, focused attention on the safety of Tesla’s driver-assistance system, known as Autopilot. This was the first federal jury trial stemming from a fatal accident involving Autopilot. Tesla has won at least one similar case filed in a California court and settled several others.

The decision comes just weeks after Tesla began limited testing of autonomous taxis in Austin, Texas. Elon Musk said in a recent conference call with investors that the service could cover half the population of United States by the end of the year. That would be unlikely. Federal safety officials were aware of at least 211 accidents from 2018 to 2023 involving Tesla cars operating with Autopilot engaged, according to evidence presented during the trial.

FEMA AND A DISASTROUS SUMMER

FEMA has been in the news for mostly the wrong reasons whether it be delays in request processing, poor communications and cumbersome processes. Originally, the Trump administration pledged to end the agency at the end of fiscal 2025 in September. That idea was quickly undermined by the magnitude of the Texas flood disaster. It is emerging how unprepared Kerr County was.

FEMA provides two types of aid after a declaration – one program is for individuals and one for local governments. The fund available to localities (Public Assistance) is much bigger. They get reimbursed for debris removal and repairs to public buildings. These grants operate as a cost-share, with the federal government covering a minimum of 75% and localities paying the rest. The program has indeed grown exponentially over time.

In fairness, two of the highest spending years were for costs related to COVID-19 responses. Nevertheless, the trend of annual growth would still be on a steady trend upwards without those “black swan” events. Now, the Trump administration is following through on an earlier pronouncement. FEMA comes to town when damages exceed a certain threshold: a state’s population multiplied by $1.89. 

NASHVILLE TUNNEL

Transportation has been a significant issue in Nashville. Prior efforts to expand transit service as well as improve traffic conditions in the city. One project which failed to get voter approval would have involved the construction of a tunnel designed to speed through traffic. It succumbed to issues of equity and cost as well as current political winds.

Now, the state’s Governor seems to have decided that what Nashville needs is not a tunnel to move traffic through town but instead a tunnel to the City’s airport. The Governor seems to feel that cutting the commute to the airport from 15 to 8 minutes warrants a tunnel. He’s been helped to that conclusion by the Boring Co., the Elon Musk entity that digs tunnels to support proposed “hyperloops”.

Despite pitches to cities like San Jose, Nashville and even Dubai,just one of Boring Co.’s public proposals have progressed beyond the planning stage. To date, the company has only begun construction in Las Vegas, and while the city has approved 68 miles of tunnels, Boring has dug about eight miles, with fewer than four miles currently operational.

Given the highly politicized history of mass transit funding and development in Nashville, the approval of a lease of state land and the proposed tunnel has been a driver of opposition. The project was announced on one day and a lease approved later that same week. Then it was found that on July 18, the state issued a temporary license with the company, permitting it to access the three-quarter acre lot to begin work nearly two weeks before the lease was approved. 

The company is on the hook for $250,000 if conditions of the agreement are not met, but is otherwise permitted to use the property for free during the 22-month lease. 

SOLAR

The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that Xcel Energy can retroactively reduce payments to most of the roughly 30,000 Minnesotans who subscribe to community solar gardens. Community solar subscribers pay solar garden operators for the energy produced by their shares and receive corresponding bill credits from their electric utilities. Xcel used the standard cost shift arguments to support their position.

Minnesota cities, school districts and universities warned reducing the credit rate would broadly increase costs to the public. In public comments, the cities of St. Paul, St. Cloud and Burnsville said the change from bill credits based on the retail rate of electricity to a lower “value of solar” formula would cost them each millions of dollars over the remaining years of their 25-year contracts. Minneapolis said 65 of its 80 community solar subscriptions would flip from saving to costing the city money, risking a property tax rise.

In California, the California Supreme Court ordered a lower court to reconsider a state policy that reduced how much utilities have to pay homeowners with rooftop solar panels for the energy that they send to the electric grid. The court did not deem the new net metering policies were illegal but said a State Court of Appeal had erred in affirming the policy without fully reviewing it and by being too deferential to state regulators.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) announced the completion of the Eland Solar-plus-Storage Center project. The power generated by both phases of the Eland project will meet 7% of LA’s total energy consumption. The Eland Solar and Storage Center is located across more than 4,600 acres of desert. Eland’s massive facility includes 1.3 million solar panels and 172 storage batteries.

In December 2024, the first phase of the project was completed. The full operational Eland facility can provide more than 1,170 megawatts of renewable energy to Los Angeles, according to the LADWP. All energy generated from the project will be sold to Southern California Public Power Authority participants, including the LADWP under 25 year contracts.

Eland is unique in that it is LADWP’s first utility-scale, integrated solar and battery project. LADWP has over 1,100 megawatts (MW) of utility-scale solar previously installed. two large-scale solar facilities will capture a combined 400 megawatts of solar energy and store up to 1,200 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy.

CLIMATE LITIGATION

A South Carolina state judge dismissed the City of Charleston’s lawsuit against fossil fuel companies. The judge found that while the lawyers argued the claims were about deception, “they are premised on, and seek redress for, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.” He said that those issues fall squarely under federal and not state law, and that the court lacked jurisdiction over out-of-state companies. A 2021 U.S. Court of Appeals decision in the Second Circuit in a similar lawsuit filed by New York City against oil companies found that the municipalities could not use state tort laws to hold multinational companies liable for damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

At the same time, three state supreme courts that have affirmed lower court rulings against the companies’ motions to dismiss, in cases brought by Boulder, Colo., Honolulu and the state of Massachusetts. The Supreme Court in January of this year declined to hear a challenge to a lawsuit filed by Honolulu against oil companies over their role in global warming.

The Supreme Court in March declined to entertain argument that aimed to restrict states from suing oil companies for financial damage related to climate change.

The argument was brought to the high court by 19 Republican attorneys general, representing states including Alabama and West Virginia, who were trying to prevent other states, led by Democrats, from pursuing lawsuits against the oil industry. Those states include California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

GEORGIA P3 FEDERAL LOAN

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced a loan of up to $3.89 billion from the Build America Bureau to a public-private partnership between the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), the State Road and Tollway Authority (SRTA), and SR 400 Peach Partners LLC (Peach Partners). The State Route 400 Express Lanes Project will add new lanes in both directions along a 16-mile section from the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) North Springs Station to one mile north of McFarland Parkway.

The design is intended to facilitate current MARTA and XPress bus connections.  Peach Partners will also provide $75 million in future bus rapid transit (BRT) related improvements. MARTA will operate the future BRT system, which is expected to share the express lanes for approximately 12 miles. The USDOT previously allocated up to $3.4 billion in Private Activity Bonds to this project, bringing the total investment to approximately $7.5 billion. This piece of the financing is a TIFIA loan.

The project calls for Peach Partners to provide a $3.8 billion concession fee to GDOT that can help fund other roadway projects as part of the public-private partnership agreement.

WIND STILL BLOWING

The federal government can stop a lot of things on public land and right now those efforts are aimed at renewables especially wind. Whether at sea or on land, the Trump administration will do all it can to slow wind generation deployment. That doesn’t mean that all new projects will be halted in their tracks. Private projects on private land are not in the federal purview.

Minnesota Power has released plans to construct the 200-megawatt Longspur Wind project in west-central North Dakota. The proposed wind farm will consist of 45 turbines and will be located in Morton and Mercer counties, just west of Bismarck and adjacent to the company’s existing Bison Wind Energy Center—a facility with 165 turbines already generating around 500MW of wind power for the region.

The Longspur project will employ the existing infrastructure, including substations and the company’s 465-mile transmission line linking central North Dakota to northeastern Minnesota. Construction is scheduled to commence in 2026, with commercial operations expected to begin by the end of 2027. All this pending required multiple approvals at both state and county levels.

Dominion Energy’s 2.6-GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is still on schedule for completion by the end of 2026, and should qualify for Inflation Reduction Act tax credits under the new safe harbor deadlines according to company management. Dominion estimates that the new tariffs will make the project more expensive by $506 million, increasing the total cost of the project to $10.9 billion. The added expenses will increase customer bills by an average of three cents a month over the entire life of the project.

CARBON CAPTURE

Archer-Daniels-Midland anticipates resuming injection later this summer at its storage site in Decatur, IL. For more than 10 months, the carbon dioxide injection well which typically sends 2,000 metric tons of CO2 underground per day has been idled. It has gone unused after testing showed evidence of a potential fluid leak. Last year EPA issued a violation order to it, alleging the company had failed to meet the requirements of its Class VI permit and allowed CO2 and other fluids to move into unauthorized zones.

Class VI wells are used to inject CO2 underground for long-term geologic storage.

EPA said ADM needs to complete steps documented in an April letter from EPA to ADM before resuming CO2 injections. EPA has 235 applications for a Class VI now under review. Half of those applications have been submitted over the past 12 months. ADM is in the process of seeking approval from to EPA to add another Class VI injection well.

NUCLEAR

NextEra Energy has filed a request with the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission seeking to reclaim interconnection rights that were previously transferred from the no longer operating Duane Arnold nuclear power plant in Iowa to a solar energy project. The single-unit 615 MWe boiling water reactor plant was taken out of service in 2020. The plant was the only operating nuclear unit in Iowa and had been producing around 9.2% of the state’s electric generation and 19% of its emission-free electricity.

A year ago, NextEra confirmed that it is looking into restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant. In January this year, the company filed a licensing change request for Duane Arnold with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company said that instead of developing a solar energy project at the site, it now plans to “reaggregate Duane Arnold’s original interconnection rights to accelerate the recommissioning of the facility”.

In New York State, the Department of Public Service proposed extending the current subsidy program for Constellation’s four nuclear reactors from the current end date of 2029 through 2049. The payments would come from ratepayers. New York was one of the first states to subsidize nuclear power plant operations with direct funding to operators.

SEPTA FUNDING

Like its compatriots in Chicago, California and Seattle, SEPTA the Philadelphia area mass transit agency is facing its own “fiscal cliff”. This week, SEPTA said that the legislature needs to approve new funding by Aug. 14 or it would move forward with its first stage of fare hikes and service cuts. The state legislature is considering a plan which would increase the amount of state sales tax revenue transferred to public transit by 1.75 percentage points.

Transit has been a major obstacle to budget enactment. The commonwealth has roughly $11 billion in financial reserves. This will quickly be pressured as many agencies especially non-profit service providers rely on timely state payments for payroll and operating expenses. Republicans who control the state Senate have argued that more transit funding should be accompanied by a dedicated funding stream, such as taxing slot-like skill games, and more money for roads and bridges.

Neither the state House nor Senate is scheduled to return to Harrisburg for voting sessions until next month. It is possible that as has been the case in past years, lawmakers could adopt a short-term, six-month deal. After a period of timely budgets followed years of delayed ones, the Commonwealth seems to be falling back into its old ways.

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