Dear friend,

Rising electricity prices are front-page news. But they aren’t the most long-lasting impact of the recent surge in power demand driven by the expansion of data centers across the country.

As Frontier Group Policy Analyst Quentin Good painstakingly documented in an article last month, expectations of rising electricity demand are giving old fossil fuel power plants a new lease on life – resulting in more air pollution that harms our health and imperils the climate.

The plants whose lifespans are being extended include some of America’s dirtiest – in fact, the 16 plants we identified emitted more greenhouse gas pollution than the entire state of Massachusetts in 2023.

But as the nation deals with new energy challenges, there are both new and time-tested solutions: Policy Associate Kylie Hanson recently tallied the benefits of 40 years of progress in energy efficiency that have saved billions of tons of air pollution and hundreds of billions of dollars. And our new data dashboard, Clean Energy Across America, spotlights the millions of Americans who have adopted clean energy technologies – from electric vehicles to solar panels – in their daily lives, showing that clean energy solutions are taking root in all 50 states.

Energy efficiency improvements and expansion of renewable energy have reduced the massive environmental and health impacts of power plants over the last decade. Whether they’ll continue to do so in the future depends on the decisions we make now.

In other recent highlights:

• We found that putting solar panels on Pennsylvania schools could produce as much electricity as 187,000 homes use in a year, while saving school districts hundreds of millions of dollars. Our report with PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center was covered by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other media outlets.
• Policy Analyst James Horrox updated our data dashboard tracking wasteful, damaging highway boondoggles – new or expanded highways that often do little to reduce congestion while diverting scarce funding from infrastructure repairs and key transportation priorities. Our updated findings were covered by Streetsblog USA.
• Kylie Hanson reviewed strategies for keeping food waste out of landfills, finding that the best solution is not to create it in the first place.

All the best,

Tony Dutzik

Associate Director/Senior Policy Analyst