Utah’s clean energy sector discusses the landscape, challenges and opportunities for growth.
Please note that the text was edited for readability and clarity, with summaries for each section AI-generated.
What are the advantages and/or disadvantages that Utah has when it comes to generating clean energy?
Answers pointing to Utah’s unique advantages ranged from bipartisan support in local government to natural resources to market demand for clean energy.
Answers about Utah’s disadvantages when it comes to clean energy included persistent air quality issues, limited utility incentives for efficiency and demand response, and underutilized grid infrastructure.
Chip Schneider: First of all, Utah has the resource; two, Utah has the demand. There’s a great deal of demand that is here today and that is coming. You need to have water, you need to have a power grid, you need to have clean air.
Plus the business climate. It’s very pro-business and I think it is always trying to evolve to enable companies like ours to grow and to provide more opportunity in this market.
Joe Hartvigsen: There’s always going to be need for growth in [transmission capacity], but we actually as a result of having coal, we have a legacy of transmission capacity that likes going to California and to wind in Wyoming, and that’s part of what has enabled that piece of the Delta project to move forward. There’s been a lot of investment and upgrades associated with that. It is a really critical resource and something that we need to protect access to … being able to interconnect to that transmission distribution network will be an important factor going forward.
Kevin Emerson: One advantage that I see, which starts as more of a challenge, is where most of the population is in Utah.
It’s an advantage because we see it firsthand when we walk out the door. It really makes it top of mind [for] folks, and it makes it less partisan and really just about how do we protect our businesses and take care of our families and grow in sustainable ways.
We have a lot to build on. We have some of the utility investments. We have massive expertise among various firms all across the state to implement flexible load solutions, energy compensation and efficiency.
One policy mechanism that Utah doesn’t have is an incentive to the utilities to invest in efficiency and demand response and flexibility, and see it as valuable as investing in new power generation that earns them a rate of return.
Joselyn Lai: Utah is, I think, famously across the United States, a state where its elected officials have a bipartisan consensus around the value of geothermal. I spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill this past year, as the lead-up to the Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the major supporter of clean energy and geothermal of all kinds remaining protected in the Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill Act was Sen. Curtis. And Sen. Curtis has a geothermal heating and cooling system in his home and has solar on his home. And I think that it’s really important to see models of elected officials from a state like Utah who can put aside the partisan storytelling around clean energy and just focus on what really brings both stability and reliability, financial savings, and health and safety to their communities and to their energy ecosystem.
Glen Anderson: We need distribution, but we also totally underutilize our transmission and distribution. So we build this big, gigantic highway, but then we only use a couple of lanes in the majority of the hours. So there are a lot of technologies that start allowing you to use your distribution better. We’ve got to be pushing that.
What does the future of clean energy in the state look like?
Based on the conversation, Utah’s clean energy future will require a large, diversified mix of renewables, storage, geothermal, nuclear and cleaner gas to meet rising demand. Success will depend on smarter grid use, flexible rates and moving beyond coal while keeping power reliable and affordable.
Robert Mount: As we talk about energy, energy magnitude is very critical. We first started over a decade ago, working on providing clean energy for data centers for the Department of Energy. We were looking at 17KW per rack. Now we’re looking at a megawatt per rack. And when we started doing gap research at the end of 2024, we were looking at a 35 gigawatt gap, and between then and now, we’re looking at a 125 gigawatt gap. As we talk about energy and break that down into categories of renewables, it’s not one solution; it’s all of the solutions combined to handle that magnitude.
With the world now being driven by AI, whether we’re talking about in the field, whether we’re talking about the military, mining or data centers in Utah, we’re talking about a totally different magnitude of energy that is here. When we talk about our homes, those are breadcrumbs. The question, I think, that is really critical, as Utah builds out and as the world builds out, is “Are we able to generate the energy we need for us?” And then, “Are we able to generate the magnitude to export?” and “What are the priorities? Is it export or is it internal?”
Anderson: We have a lot of solar here. I think Utah residential rooftop penetration is less than 10 percent. You go to Australia, you’re north to 40 percent, closing down on 50 percent. They add up quickly. They’re small individually, but you start adding up gigawatts to do that. Why are we not there? There are a whole lot of arguments: Rate structures don’t support it and we pay four times as much for residential solar in the United States as they do in Australia. If you start pairing things down, things will start moving, the markets will drive that.
Schneider: As we look at what the energy future looks like in this state, the needs will be steep. However, I tell people when I talk about my business, we’re not the solution. We’re part of the solution, but we can’t be the solution. We can’t scale. And so you have to decide, “How are we going to pursue this energy future? What are we going to champion?” I certainly want geothermal on that list because we are part of the solution. We can provide that carbon-free base load power. But secondly, how are we going to scale? And scale is going to come from probably gas-fired generation and from nuclear power, such as SMRs.
And we have to figure out what is the right framework to foster the growth in all three of these sources of electricity, because the scale is going to come from the traditional sources, nuclear and gas.
We’ve got to get to a place where we’re deciding that these are the technologies we’re going to follow and these are the technologies we’re going to encourage our universities to put research into and find solutions for.
Solar is good, wind’s good, but we’ve got to come up with ways to extend the life of solar and wind. And if that’s through batteries, then I’m confident that we have resources here in Utah that will enable us to do it.
Emerson: We have ample renewable energy resources in those that are intermittent and really need to be improved with storage. And the good news is we have had so much growth in storage, battery storage, mostly residential in the state over the last five years or so, there’s around 8,000 batteries now distributed through the utility, and that’s going to probably double and more in the next couple of years. And that doesn’t even mention the capacity for battery storage on commercial properties. And then there’s the utility-scale storage. And the good news is the storage price is going down; our utility is actively promoting storage and solar for their customers because they can control it and they can use it to balance supply and demand on the grid. So it’s exciting to see that happen. We’re going to need storage to pair with the cheapest renewables of solar.
Anderson: One little paradigm shift that also needs to occur is that we’ve always generated electricity to match what people were using. That’s always been the focus of that, the power industry. Solar is getting so cheap. The absolute cheapest electron is solar, without a doubt, and it’s going to continue to get cheaper. It’s just not always available when and where you want it. So that’s a problem. But people do have the ability to change their usage patterns. There are a lot of industries; if you create the rate structure, people can start shifting loads. That doesn’t solve all the problems, but it sure starts solving a lot of the problems. And that’s one of the biggest barriers we have, which is that we don’t have the structures to push people to use it when and where it’s available.
Hartvigsen: So one thing related to that is that you mentioned is that we service the load from below the load curve by ramping up and down generation. And of course, solar is always, at least if the sun’s on its semiconductor speed, bringing that on. The problem is that it really challenges everything to keep the grid stable. The real solution to that, in my mind, is to service the grid from above the load curve by having a lot of behind-the-meter generation for things like hydrogen, sustainable fuels, the industrial applications where you have dedicated dispatchable loads.
If we were to displace all of petroleum with sustainable fuels from hydrogen and with the hydrocarbons that are synthesized from C2 that’s captured, it would require five times the current grid generation. So that’s a lot of base load and hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, things that we normally put in that renewable category aren’t going to do it. It’s really going to take nuclear energy on a massive scale. And so, hopefully, this small modular nuclear reactor wave that’s being driven by AI data centers, which everyone’s so excited about, hopefully, that happens and we can now go way above the grid demand load.
If Utah can look beyond its fossil past in terms of coal, we’re not trying to take away coal before it has a better option. If we can say what’s going to come next and get ahead of that with this whole range of things, then we have the opportunity to really be leaders and put ourselves in a very strong position, economically, for this new energy world that’s on its way.
Hailei Wang: I think one of the biggest projects is this advanced clean energy storage for hydrogen. Utah has this unique energy resource: these salt caverns, which can store this massive amount of hydrogen, that’s probably the most economically viable approach to store hydrogen, which can even out the peaks and valleys in terms of generation demand. As more and more renewable energy options grow, and demand fractures on its own — also adding intermittency of this and renewables makes that demand curve even steeper and not any just on the seasonal kind of scale, but also on the daily scale in the winter and also in the summer — those energy storage like hydrogen can be basically the energy carrier that can carry a lot of different kinds of societies, through those seasonal discrepancies in terms of energy use.
David W. Griffin: I think one of the great things about Utah is we view problems not as problems, but as opportunities. And we’ve built a web here of energy and cost and opportunity in our discussion today, from nuclear to hydrogen to geothermal renewables, other renewables of solar as well. What maybe we haven’t really dived into as much is the cost. We are starting to hint at it. With AI, though, and the demand that it is putting on the grid is driving up costs for everyone in the energy sector, not just the AI user, but everyone who lives in the state. Utah is historically known for its low energy costs. There’s been talk about these data centers being required to bring their own power with them, which is kind of where the small modular reactors come into play to keep those costs down. We talked about air quality earlier as well. We touched on EV and how it affects the grid, but really, EV is not just a storage solution, potentially, but it’s an air quality solution.
What impacts do policies, federal and state and local, have on green energy generation?
Federal and state policies, along with utility rate structures, strongly influence clean energy in Utah, per the conversation — tax credits and incentives drive adoption, while gaps in programs and load-shifting incentives limit growth.
Erica Jewkes: The 30 percent federal tax credit that was going around forever, I don’t know when it started. I’ve been in solar since 2014 when I started in San Diego. When I used to knock on doors and go into the neighborhoods, nobody had solar. But now in 2025, every home has solar except for maybe one that didn’t qualify. It’s amazing how it has shifted so much. But now, that 30 percent federal tax credit is going away. In Utah, we don’t have a leasing option to lease solar panels or do a power purchase agreement. Most of my customers I set up in San Diego and all of California didn’t go out and buy their solar panels or even take out a loan to finance them, like how you can do it here in Utah. But a financing company would buy the panels for the homeowner, and as long as the homeowner qualified with a 650 credit score, they could get solar panels installed on their home and immediately save 50 percent off their electric bill.
Schneider: EVs are important, and air quality is an important thing to me. I drive into that haze. I come through Parley’s Canyon, drive into Salt Lake City and it’s immediately a different environment. And I think that’s an important thing for Utahns: water, electric grid, air quality. We’ve got to have those three things for growth — those are the three key infrastructure concerns. I think the state can provide more incentives for EVs. The federal government is taking that away. And so why can’t the state of Utah try to resurrect some sort of program that continues to encourage the purchase of EVs? Secondly, renewable energy credits. We don’t have a concept of renewable energy credits. California wants to get to a certain level of carbon production by 2030 and then to zero carbon by 2045. Do we have those hardcoded goals in the state of Utah? I know we have some loose goals around trying to reduce carbon by 2030, but do we really want to eradicate carbon from the environment by a certain date? Because that’s what they’re moving toward and they’re willing to invest in it. That’s where you have to really work from a policy standpoint to encourage certain types of development.
Lai: I think utilities are a really key part to shifting the load curve and changing the load curve or load shape. I think a lot of the earlier conversation today was about how to meet the load curve where it is, and it’s almost like accepting that the load curve is always going to be incredibly picky. If you are looking at it, serving it from the bottom up, it forces you into all these conversations about really big infrastructure questions like permitting, who has access to these hydrogen resources. And you are coming at it with only really large blunt hammers that can be tied up in permitting and ownership questions for many years. On the other hand, I think utilities have visibility to incentivize load-shifting and demand-curve changes that can be much more behind-the-meter and can have a lot more rapid and modular deployment that could have speed, if maybe not scale immediately, but at least you have speed.
The state of Utah and the utilities here are a little bit behind the folks in Colorado. If you look across the border, there are many co-ops and then Xcel Energy itself in Colorado, where they have done that math and have rate-based customer programs that will put money towards geothermal heating and cooling, among other load-shifting and load curve reduction solutions that then become a way to free up power capacity. So instead of everybody trying to serve base load power that needs to meet a demand curve at its peak, let’s just bring the demand curve down. And then now you have existing base load power and existing transmission and distribution not being utilized very much.
Anderson: Erica pointed out the residential EV charging. It’s three or four times more expensive to charge during peak hours. They updated the commercial rate on Dec. 1, 2025. It’s like 20 percent more during peak hours. That’s not moving the needle. And companies that want to make investments, say they want to do thermal storage to shift their loads, but the signals are not there. It doesn’t pay back. The rate structures are not encouraging people to move there, definitely not businesses to move their loads.
How can rate structures and energy allocations be used more effectively to improve grid utilization?
Participants discussed how rate structures and energy allocations can boost grid utilization by encouraging load-shifting, using virtual power plants, and pairing electrification with flexible solutions like geothermal heating.
April Guymon: We absolutely need to get more innovative about our rate structures, and I think everybody needs to think about virtual power plants. There’s so much opportunity to aggregate load and shift it in these virtual power plants. It’s been weird to see how successful the residential sector has been in this. If you’ve got a smart thermostat in your house, there is so much capacity to be able to shift just by changing somebody’s house settings a few degrees in a way that they don’t even really notice. So we need to take those concepts that have been driven into the residential area and put those into the commercial area more aggressively. We need to demand that our big load users come up with better solutions or incentivize them to come up with solutions to participate as a virtual power plant.
And I think it’s really important. SWEEP, the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, came out with a great article recently on data centers and some of the ways that Utah and all the other states participating in SWEEP could really take advantage of as these hyperscale data centers are coming online. One of the things they suggested was maybe bargaining with that interconnection time, which takes a really long time to get interconnection approval. If you can shorten that, maybe you can bargain for that time as a requirement that they put in batteries or other things that help them be more flexible with the grid.
Schneider: It’s all about asset utilization, right? I mean, we do build for peak, but that means when you’re not at peak, you’re letting a lot of assets go to waste. It’s like sending off a plane that’s half-full. You’re losing all that revenue, all that utilization on that flight. And so it’s the same with power plants.
When I started in the electric industry, the peak-to-valley was pretty steep. It’s coming in a little bit because during the day, we now use LED lighting and cost-efficient and energy-efficient computers, chips and appliances. When you bring in data centers, they’re 24/7 and they’re going to make a huge impact in bringing this into more balance, I think, because those data centers will be operating. Now, they might operate more during the day than at night, but they’re going to be global in nature. But there’s so much more we can do.
Guymon: Maybe we can ask them to use their AI to do things that are smarter. Can they take that energy base load they’re using and, when we hit a peak, can they use AI to more smartly incentivize other customers to shift to smarter, more automatic ways? I think this is the future, that AI is this scary, energy-sucking thing. It’s also this potential to bring solutions. We have to demand that from AI.
Hartvigsen: The asset utilization point of it, you can look at it on both sides. You can look at it on the generation side or the demand side. So if the demand-side asset costs are low, then it makes it easier to shift demand.
If AI ever gets to the point where the hardware’s cheap enough, it’s easy to move the information around the globe. You could imagine having solar-powered AI, and wherever the sun’s up and shining, that’s where all the information’s processed. It depends on the relative cost of the infrastructure that you’re leaving idle part of the time, and what you’re calling a virtual power plant is what I call a dispatchable load. If you have a demand that you can control, it’s just as effective as controlling generation because it’s all about finding the balance between generation and consumption, which has to be in equilibrium instantaneously, all the time, forever.
You can use policy, you can use market forces, but it takes a lot of customer or consumer education, and it’s difficult.
Anderson: We talk about grid utilization, how we have bigger valleys, and we’re bringing that closer, and data centers can bring it even more. One thing that really concerns me in a somewhat cold climate here in Utah is when we go over to electrifying our heating. Here in Utah, we’ve got Operation Gigawatt, which talks about clean energy. I don’t hear any conversations about cutting out fossil fuel use in our heating. There’s migration going into air source heat pumps, but air source heat pumps, when we get down to zero degrees, are going to kill our grid.
Lai: You can electrify, while also reducing that demand, but really, geothermal heating and cooling is the main lever for that. I will say to this point, though, it depends a lot on your state policy and your state politics. I think at Bedrock Energy, we are drilling in Texas, Colorado, and we drilled in Utah, not too far from here. We have drilled and installed systems in New York and when we look at the national landscape for where folks are thinking about “How do you electrify heat without destroying your grid?” The states that care a lot about it are states like New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and, to a certain extent, Colorado. These are states where, at the state policy level, they are thinking about the future of heat, and they are thinking about a future beyond gas and pushing their gas utilities to find a business model where they can serve clean heat without completely destroying the grid or straining the grid.
I think that in a state like Utah, if you’re not going to have those tailwinds and there’s RECs and net-zero goals, carbon-free goals, then that’s not the lever to use to push for a stable form of electrification of heat. I think the language has to be really different. It has to be about freeing up capacity. It has to be about resilience. It has to be about meeting economic growth.
So what are potential downsides about full electrification of energy sources? What solutions exist?
Potential downsides of full electrification discussed included the risk of grid failure, especially during peak winter demand, but solutions like distributed renewables, battery storage, seasonal energy storage, and hybrid systems using hydrogen or synthetic natural gas can provide reliability and resilience.
Schneider: There are also risk issues associated with fully electrifying your energy sources. I’m all for decarbonization, don’t get me wrong. We have to work on decarbonizing the sources that we use today, but natural gas also provides diversity. If we were a hundred percent electric in the state of Utah in the middle of January and the grid goes down, you’ve got a problem. So that’s where I see that there’s probably some hesitance to go fully electric because you’ve got a risk issue that you could have a lot of cold people in January. They can’t use their stoves, they can’t use their heating systems. And again, I’m all for decarbonization, but I also think there’s a risk issue that needs to be considered.
Emerson: In our office building, at the Climate Innovation Center, we electrified and we have on-site solar and a battery just to provide that protection. So if we do lose power, our building will operate at a slightly lower demand, which allows us to maintain some basic temperatures and some of the equipment. If every home did that, it would be a challenge, but incorporating distributed renewables and storage can really address that in a major way.
Lai: It might be more expensive on a per-kilowatt basis to do distributed systems, but distributed systems are also a form of national security. Honestly, I think it’s all of the above to have backup fossil fuels and then also to have behind-the-meter systems, and that’s the only way we’re going to have resiliency as we as a country are growing in very particular regions and in very particular industries.
Hartvigsen: I really prefer to look at it in terms of de-fossilization, because gas is really such a useful infrastructure and this facility that we’re hosting, our demo is putting RNG onto the distribution network and there’s opportunities for putting more RNG on, but there’s also opportunities to electrify the gas network with hydrogen or with SNG, synthetic natural gas, which is kind of an oxymoron. So it’s maybe a substitute natural gas, and that’s actually very, very efficient to convert electricity, to use electricity to convert CO2 and steam into SNG, which can then indistinguishably go into the network.
Questar, before the Enbridge acquisition, was doing some experiments with putting hydrogen into the gas line down in Delta. It doesn’t really take a lot of engineering analysis to see the folly in it because methane is 800 kilojoules per mole, hydrogen is 248, so the same volume you put 5 percent in and you only get 96 percent of the energy that you had before. It takes up space but doesn’t have a lot of energy. And then there’s the whole metallurgy problems. So that’s where I think the SNG opportunity of taking electricity, converting CO2 and steam, putting methane in and it can go bidirectionally because there’s the ability to store natural gas.
Hailei: You also can do this seasonal energy storage. People have been using that too so that you can put in, for example, if you’re living in the southern part of Utah, you can use some of solar energy to actually put it on the ground and for winter can utilize a heat pump, getting your space or water heated. I think people are doing that, particularly some in European countries.
How do data centers and their water usage factor into energy consumption in the state?
Data centers in Utah significantly impact energy and water use, participants said, but by capturing waste heat for district heating, using efficient water-source heat pumps, and reducing evaporative cooling, they can lower peak energy demand, save water and provide communitywide heating benefits.
Lai: What Utah could pioneer uniquely, with all the data centers coming online, one data center, their waste heat could serve thousands of homes.
Thermal energy networks are an incredibly underutilized category in the U.S., largely due to the need for significant public-private development. Europe is a little bit further ahead, but Utah has a lot of heating demand — that is not true in Texas. And I think it’s not going to happen everywhere where the U.S. has high data center development. Still, its community is more balanced and Texas has a much more cooling dominant load in its homes, but Utah has a lot more heating load. I think someone mentioned domestic hot water needs 24/7 and that a development in that vein would be fantastic here.
Griffin: It’s interesting to go back to a smaller scale, too, on an individual building level. We’re seeing people want to electrify and they’re trying to figure out how to do that, knowing that rate structures may change and trying to make the economics of it work. What we’re seeing is that as long as the project has the square footage, they’re installing thermal storage as a solution. It doesn’t have to be a stratified tank. They’re fully mixing it. They’re taking the water coming from the ground, which is ground temperature, taking advantage of geothermal and water source heat pumps which work much better in our climate than air source heat pumps and are more efficient, and using that and then backing that up with a much smaller reduction in size to a backup boiler, for instance, that would be electrical or even gas.
Hartvigsen: So this data center, using the heat for beneficial purposes, would have a very valuable side effect because you hear about how much water usage the data center has, all the water usage of the data center is just evaporative cooling on the cooling tower, and that is really a poor usage of water here. So you can use the heat pump and pump down underground and then pull it up to the district feeding or whatever that would be.
Lai: I think it’s multifaceted in that way because you save water on all the evaporative cooling, which is beneficial for the community as you have growth. It’s not just energy; you also need water and clean air. I think the second one is providing free heat to the community. And the actual third one is that in a typical data center, of course, Google and Meta may have higher efficiency, but you might be using 30 to 40 percent on top of your processing power for cooling. And so, utilizing more efficient cooling can shave the peak cooling demand of a data center. And that too benefits the grid in the way that we’ve been talking about. So kind of a three-prong value prop.
Emerson: If only we had someone from The Point (a planned development in Draper, Utah) here or someone from the Power District. Those are transformational, generational opportunities where these technologies and approaches make so much sense. At least with The Point, the state, as the owner of the land, has a lot of opportunity to push the project to do something innovative. I don’t know about the Power District, but you have our industrial utility, which is a major tenant or anchor in the Power District.
Mount: No. 1 is collaboration and cooperation. That is harder to solve than the energy problem. The other is trust, and that is trust in the cloud, trust in the AI, trust in the utility company and trust in the government. So, I mean, we can technically solve these problems, but these are deeper problems that are harder to address.
Anderson: You start with nationally, we’ve had two decades of stable electricity. We haven’t grown. So all of a sudden we’re growing and at the same time we’re talking about decarbonizing. So we’re putting a double challenge in front of us. And expecting any one party to solve it, that’s not going to happen. It’s got to be everyone at the table working together. … Technologies aren’t there yet, but I think 80 percent of it is there.