In 2019, as the U.S. experienced its wettest spring on record, the Mississippi River and its tributaries overran their banks. One million acres of Midwestern farmland flooded. In Nebraska alone, the unprecedented rainfall killed three residents, drowned thousands of cows and pigs, and caused over $1 billion in property damage.
“I very specifically remember the Facebook parade of just absolutely absurd photos of people in kayaks in places where you should never have a kayak,” said John Brockmeier ’22, a Yale student from Kearney, NE, a town of 30,000 along the Platte River.
Despite scientific evidence linking increased precipitation in the Midwest to climate change, Nebraska’s reliably red elected officials have not acted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020, the conservative-controlled Nebraska legislature blocked a proposal to even study the impacts of climate change on the state. Republican Governor Pete Ricketts, who said that the floods caused “the most extensive damage our state has ever experienced,” has emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the Biden administration’s climate policy.
Yet in December 2021, Nebraska became the first Republican-controlled state with plans to reduce carbon emissions from electricity to net zero by 2050. This goal brought Nebraska in line with the widely used net zero timeline that has underpinned international climate negotiations, including the 2015 Paris Agreement. The driving force was not Nebraska’s governor or state legislature, but the state’s three major electricity providers, which, driven by environmental activists, announced their intentions to decarbonize.
Although these decisions did not make national headlines, the Nebraskan resolutions highlight how utilities can be key actors in the global fight for net zero emissions. The ability of Nebraska’s environmental groups and utility officials to advance climate policy –– independent of the state’s governor and state legislature –– may offer a roadmap for other states where climate action has stalled.
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When Mary Harding decided in 2002 to run for a seat on the board of the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD), the state’s largest electric utility, she did not even raise enough money to file a campaign finance report. Harding’s fight to decarbonize Nebraska began uncontested –– her opponent, who advanced with her through an open primary, dropped out before the general election.
At the time, Harding served as the executive director of the Nebraska Environmental Trust, a state grant-making program funded by the Nebraska Lottery. Environmental issues, including nuclear waste and climate change, motivated her to run for one of the eleven seats on the NPPD’s non-partisan board. “When I was administering grants, I became exposed to a large number of scientists who were concerned at an early point about climate change and global warming,” Harding explained. “The science was compelling to me. So it’s been something that I wanted to do something about in my own small way.”
In 2021, Harding became board chair. Under her leadership, the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) voted 9-2 to set a non-binding goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, adopting a target used by over 150 countries, a dozen states, and many Fortune 500 companies. Climate scientists say the world must reach net zero emissions by 2050 in order to limit warming to 1.5º C, the threshold for avoiding runaway climate change.
For Harding, the net zero target was the culmination of 18 years of advocacy. “This resolution has been a personal priority of mine since I joined the board, really,” she said. “It’s been a long and delicate slog over a couple of decades to get to the point where we were able to see the sense in decarbonizing.” To pass the resolution, clean energy advocates had to both elect new environmentally-minded board members and win support from some incumbents.
Given the non-binding nature of the resolution, the vote represents a signal to NPPD management that can help shape future decision-making. The one-page resolution explicitly mentioned potential decarbonization strategies such as certified carbon offsets, energy efficiency projects, lower-carbon power sources (such as wind and solar), and electrification initiatives.
The NPPD’s 2021 vote followed actions by Nebraska’s two other major utilities, the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) and the Lincoln Electric System (LES), in 2019 and 2020. The Omaha- and Lincoln-based utilities provide electricity to the state’s two largest cities, while the NPPD services most of the state’s rural customers, who tend to be more politically conservative. With all three public power districts aiming to reach net zero, Nebraska became the first Republican-controlled state with a goal of decarbonizing almost its entire electricity sector. Environmentalists hope that Nebraska’s majority-coal energy mix will begin to look more like that of neighboring Iowa, where wind energy has surged to provide 40% of electricity, up from less than 10% in 2005. Nebraska currently generates around 20% of its electricity from wind and practically none from solar.
The utilities’ influence over climate policy has put board members in the crosshairs of interest groups, including environmental activists and the state’s industrial electricity consumers. Indeed, Harding’s most recent reelection race in 2020 looked very different from her first uncontested foray into politics. “Now, it’s the same kind of unbelievable politics we have in nearly any race nearly anywhere in the country,” Harding lamented in a phone call as she ran errands with her husband. “There was one mailer put out about me saying I was a carpetbagger. I’m a seventh generation Nebraskan! The mailer was saying I don’t even live here.” Even Governor Ricketts, the son of TD Ameritrade billionaire Joe Ricketts, waded into the fray, donating $5,000 to support Harding’s opponent, Todd Calfee. Nebraska’s Republican Party spent $41,256 opposing Harding, despite the technically nonpartisan nature of the race.
Harding raised around $50,000 in her 2020 bid, three times more than the $17,000 she raised just one cycle ago in 2014.
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Charlie Kennedy, another supporter of the net zero resolution, is a more recent addition to the NPPD board. He ran for office at the urging of a nationally-prominent environmental group, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), and its Nebraska chapter, Nebraska Conservation Voters (NECV).
The LCV cold-called Kennedy after the organization spotted that he was one of the first NPPD customers to buy into a local solar project and heard his name mentioned as an active community member. “I would never have thought of doing that myself, but the more I looked at it, where things were at with Nebraska… it just seemed unacceptable to me,” Kennedy said of his run for office. In particular, he became concerned when he learned that the majority of Nebraska’s power came from just a handful of coal plants. Kennedy trounced an incumbent who was less supportive of clean energy, winning almost every county in his rural territory.
Besides Kennedy, the NECV helped recruit other candidates for the NPPD and the Omaha and Lincoln utility boards. During the 2016 cycle alone, the group organized volunteers who knocked on 20,000 doors, made 15,000 live calls, and sent 88,000 mailings. In 2020, the LCV spent a reported $500,000 on utility races in Nebraska. The LCV has stayed involved past election days, too, offering guidance on how board members should vote. The NECV and its executive director, State Senator Eliot Bostar, did not respond to requests for comment.
Harding herself served as executive director of NECV from 2007-2009 while on the NPPD board, which is a part-time position. However, she said that during her tenure, the group’s electoral work only focused on state legislative races, not utility board seats.
Clean energy opponents took notice of the LCV’s success. These opponents included the state’s powerful ethanol industry, a major electricity consumer which fears that a shift to wind and solar may create supply issues and raise rates. “For ethanol producers the reliability and affordability of electricity are critical,” said Dawn Caldwell, the executive director of the ethanol trade association Renewable Fuels Nebraska, in an email. “Ethanol producers appreciate that alternative sources of electricity may be utilized but must have a reliable source of electricity in case of low generation from wind/solar.” Renewable Fuels Nebraska was among the donors to a PAC that opposes pro-clean energy candidates, including Harding.
Yet despite well-funded opposition, clean energy advocacy in Nebraska has become a rare bright spot for environmentalists in red states. Over the past three election cycles, the slant of the NPPD board has grown friendlier to renewables. Voters in 2016, 2018, and 2020 elected a cohort of LCV-backed candidates that included an Independent (Melissa Freeland), a Republican (Bill Hoyt), and a Democrat (Gary Thompson). Out of the 11 total board members, Harding and Kennedy are the only ones who responded to requests for comment.
According to Kennedy, the board now includes six members who consistently “want to see more green energy” and five who take the more traditional approach that “we have to listen to our wholesale customers, we can’t make them mad.” Out of those five traditional board members, three joined the environmentally-minded bloc to support the net zero resolution. “I think there was a little bit of fatigue,” Kennedy said of the three board members who were won over. “You know, we can’t fight this anymore.”
Harding says that the new board members alone were not sufficient to make the resolution possible. Building consensus around net zero required first gathering information and consulting with stakeholders.“Even with the turnover, we would never have gotten the votes if we hadn’t done the groundwork,” she reflected.
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This groundwork consisted of collaboration between the NPPD’s board members and its day-to-day management team, including CEO Tom Kent, an unelected operator. Together, they spent three years in the run-up to the resolution consulting with experts to assess economic, regulatory, and technological trends.
“Tom is very well-regarded for being very pragmatic,” Kennedy explained. “Him being on board helped convince them. And then some of the wholesale customers kind of said, you know, ‘Everybody else is doing this… we can live with it.’”
The NPPD leaders found that the trends pointed toward decarbonization. “We anticipate requirements to reduce carbon footprints will continue to increase due to customer expectations, other business considerations and regulatory policies,” said Grant Otten, an NPPD spokesperson, in an email. Otten cited concerns from rating agencies, lenders, investors, and insurance companies about the future of carbon-intensive businesses. He also noted that consumers of Nebraska’s agricultural products increasingly consider the carbon footprint of those products, meaning that decarbonization could deliver value for farmers and ranchers.
Many national leaders share the NPPD’s view. “The cost of wind turbines and solar panels continues to fall drastically, making renewable energy competitive with, or less expensive than, burning fossil fuels,” former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger said in a statement to The Politic. “Clean energy is best for consumers.” Under the leadership of Schwarzenneger, a Republican, California became the first state to adopt a cap on carbon emissions in 2006.
Yet over the short-term, the economics of the energy transition still remain daunting for Nebraska’s utilities. Nebraskans enjoy some of the lowest electricity rates in the country, paying an average price per kilowatt hour of only 8.97 cents. The national average is 10.59 cents; Connecticut’s rate is one of the highest at 19.13 cents. In Nebraska and other red states, such as Wyoming (8.27 cents) and Texas (8.36 cents), low rates derive in part from proximity to cheap fossil fuels.
Just northwest of Nebraska sits the Powder River Basin, offering Nebraskan power plants easy access to the country’s foremost coal-producing region. “The cost of our coal is among the lowest in the nation,” Harding explained. “So there’s an economic advantage for our customers.” This economic advantage means that relative to states with higher fossil fuel costs, Nebraska has less incentive to immediately transition to clean energy.
Moreover, utility business models are not meant to absorb the capital costs of building new low-carbon infrastructure as quickly as possible. The NPPD and other electricity providers expect their fossil fuel-powered plants to last for decades, meaning that retiring these plants early –– without significantly cheaper alternatives –– may lead to unanticipated expenses that are passed onto consumers.
Given this limitation, efforts to overhaul the NPPD’s energy mix could take decades. “There’s such a long timeline to plan our resources,” Harding explained. “You know, most of our baseload plants are 40 years old, some are 50 years old.” This long time horizon also creates an opening for cleaner sources of electricity generation and storage. “We’re thinking with the timeline, we’ve got 30 years, the technology’s got time to be there,” Harding said.
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It is not just Nebraska’s politics that have evolved since Harding first joined the NPPD. The state’s weather has changed, too.
“When I first started, we did not have annual capital catastrophes,” Harding said, referring to weather damaging the NPPD’s infrastructure. “There was one year in the early 2000s when we had a horrific ice storm… It’s come to be an annual event, where some extreme weather takes out a dam or takes out power lines.”
But voters do not necessarily view the extreme weather as evidence of human-caused climate change. “It would be very rare for a farmer or rancher to talk about climate change,” explained Brockmeier, whose maternal grandparents and other extended family members have worked in Nebraska’s agricultural sector. “But I’ve certainly heard farmers and ranchers talk about the weather being different than it was 20 years ago.”
Brockmeier’s uncle, a rancher, experienced this extreme weather directly. In addition to flooding Nebraska’s rivers and plains, the March 2019 storms also brought unprecedented snow and ice to the state, which impacted livestock. “The way the normal ranching operation works is that calving is anywhere between like the end of February and middle of April. March is your calving month,” said Brockmeier. “My uncle was hauling away a pickup load of dead cows from just kind of a very, very unusual March storm.”
Brockmeier, who studies the history of the American West at Yale, described policy in Nebraska as “beholden” to farmers and ranchers. “They’re very, very, very knowledgeable about what they do,” he said. “But they come from very, very, very conservative cultural backgrounds in that everyone’s Protestant and everyone basically came over from some European country in the 1880s.”
The NPPD’s 9-2 vote for the net zero resolution did not come about because of widespread voter recognition of climate science –– or even because of popular demands for clean energy. Instead, when Harding and other clean energy advocates ran for the NPPD board, they focused on what she called “pocketbook” issues. These bread-and-butter concerns included not just electricity rates themselves, but also more general economic issues and counties’ tax burdens. “I talked about the need to modernize the system, the economic benefits of transitioning to wind and solar power, the property tax relief that is available for counties when those go in,” Harding said.
Every six years when Harding runs for reelection, she goes door-to-door to speak with voters. She has not seen support for clean energy increase since her first election in 2002. Rather, as political polarization and misinformation have intensified, Harding says that the opposite is true. “What I’ve noticed over the last couple of decades is that support for new technologies like wind and solar has been declining,” Harding said. “There is a proliferation of bad information –– you know, wind turbines give you cancer. Solar reflections are going to interfere with the productivity of your cows.”
Empirical opinion polling from Nebraska is sparse and possibly outdated. According to a 2015 survey by the University of Nebraska Lincoln, three-quarters of rural Nebraskans believed that the state should invest much more or somewhat more in wind and solar. However, a majority of rural Nebraskans (52%) also believed that the state should invest the same amount in coal.
To some extent, the net zero resolution reflected this tension. The 2050 target gives the NPPD a long timeline and significant flexibility, rather than the swift transition to renewables that some climate advocates desire. “For me, I think the faster we can decarbonize, the better,” Harding remarked. “But for this utility, that didn’t really fit as well. It wasn’t the middle ground we needed.”
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Many of Nebraska’s institutions, including its utilities, are anomalies. During presidential elections, political analysts must explain the state’s habit of allocating electoral votes by congressional district, rather than aggregating them statewide. This system, shared only by Maine, enabled President Biden to win one of Nebraska’s five electors in 2020. Nebraskans are also the only Americans represented by a nonpartisan, unicameral state legislature. So it follows that while 49 states rely on a hybrid of investor-owned and publicly-owned utilities, Nebraska is the only state that effectively requires that utilities be publicly-owned. As a result, the three major public power districts dominate the grid.
Elsewhere, the utility landscape looks more complicated. Robert Klee, a former commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, called utilities “a real sleepy sort of backworld and very arcane world.”
“It’s a world with its own language, its own set of laws,” explained Klee, who now lectures about subnational climate action at the Yale School of Environment. “It has origins back in the regulation of railroads, so the 1800s.”
Nebraska’s three major power districts are publicly-owned utilities (POUs). Other POUs, such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, are typically affiliated with municipal governments and depend on cities for funding and oversight. By extension, municipal policymakers often call the shots on how utilities approach climate policy. Some POUs, including the three major Nebraskan utilities, are governed by elected boards, giving voters a say, too.
Beyond Nebraska, most electric companies are not public. Investor-owned utilities (IOUs) provide about 72% of electricity in the U.S., usually under the watchful eye of state-level regulatory bodies known as public utility or public service commissions. These commissioners are sometimes elected, offering an opportunity for voters to influence utility regulation. The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) has invested in utility commission races in states like Arizona, where the group identified an opportunity to flip the Arizona Corporation Commission. In Georgia, an LCV-backed candidate for the Georgia Public Service Commission made headlines when he qualified for the January 2021 runoff that also determined control of the U.S. Senate. The candidate, Daniel Blackman, lost narrowly to a more conservative incumbent.
Non-profit cooperatives (“co-ops”), found most commonly in the rural Midwest and Southeast, offer perhaps the most unique utility structure. Authorized as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act of 1936, the organizations are owned by members who receive electricity. The U.S.’s 812 co-ops serve just 25,000 members on average, but in total, the non-profits provide electricity to more than 40 million American customers. Co-ops often depend on legacy coal plants, are governed by opaque boards, and face financial challenges that stymie investments in innovation.
The NPPD buys and sells electricity from Nebraska’s co-ops, such as the Elkhorn Rural Public Power District. Some of these co-ops –– concerned by the NPPD’s shift toward cleaner alternatives –– formed a PAC called Nebraskans for Affordable and Reliable Electricity (NARE), which opposed Harding and other LCV-backed candidates. NARE did not respond to requests for comment.
Public utility board members like Harding and Kennedy, along with the utility regulators who oversee privately-owned electricity generation, are on the frontlines of the climate fight. “They are the implementers of so much of what actually gets built in the energy space,” Klee said. “And we’re going to be needing to build a lot of stuff.”
Putting the right people in the right roles is important. “We get real innovators in that space, who see the levers they can pull,” Klee said. “And there’s this growing cohort of utility commissioners that are really fantastic and are thinking about these things.”
As utilities and utility commissions receive more attention, the challenges that they face have become clearer. Schwarzenegger recently authored an opinion piece in the New York Times warning that California’s utility commission might implement a “solar tax,” requiring homeowners with solar panels to pay more toward the collective upkeep of the grid. Supporters argue that the system would be fairer for apartment owners and those who cannot afford solar panels.
Schwarzenegger emphasized that climate advocates must focus on the benefits of renewables beyond emissions reduction. “Trying to get utility regulators to focus on climate change is a losing proposition,” he said. “It is much smarter to talk to them about their bottom line.” In addition to renewables often costing less, he said, wind and solar also “don’t produce pollution which kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year and is increasingly being taxed throughout America.”
In total, electricity accounts for about 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This share may grow as more sectors, such as transportation, shift toward electrification in order to decarbonize. Power companies have significant influence over decarbonization, but since electricity represents only a fraction of total emissions, net zero commitments by utilities do not have the same impact as state-wide or national-level net zero policy making. Some notable sources of emissions, such as cement production and agriculture, lie outside of utilities’ purview.
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As federal-level climate policy stagnates, the mantle of climate action has increasingly shifted down the ballot. After President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, a “We Are Still In” coalition of cities and states stepped up. The mostly-Democratic governors and mayors pledged to deliver the U.S.’s emissions reduction commitments even without federal action.
Utilities may have more limited influence than these governors and mayors. Yet officials like Harding make key subnational decisions with decarbonization implications, often in the face of intense pressure from interest groups.
Harding is a registered Democrat in a red state and a climate advocate represented by a governor who rejects climate science. “She’s made some enemies, you know, from people around the state because of her stance,” Kennedy observed. “She’s targeted by some of the conservatives as our ‘Nebraskan AOC.’”
Harding, a mother of four and grandmother of three, cited her children and grandchildren as a motivation for her persistence. “I would do absolutely anything for them –– even subject myself to public elections,” she quipped.
But her point about the climate crisis was serious. “I would not be serving this year –– I would have retired last time around, but I imagine myself on my deathbed,” she said. “And my granddaughter’s looking at me going, ‘Everything was gonna be a disaster, and you walked away.’”