A new Sierra Club report on the commitment of U.S. utilities to clean-energy transition gives a high grade to one major Oklahoma utility and a flunking grade to another.
The environmental group’s latest edition of “The Dirty Truth” report finds that the country’s biggest electric utilities are collectively doing worse on climate goals than when the organization started tracking their progress five years ago. This year they earned an aggregate grade of “F” for the first time.
Who received a good grade in Oklahoma? Public Service Company of Oklahoma was given an “A” grade for its effort to retire coal-burning power plants, to switch to clean energy by 2035 and for building no new natural gas projects by the same time period.
But Oklahoma’s other major utility company, Oklahoma Gas and Electric received a failing grade from the Sierra Club report.
The overall grade for utilities nationwide left Sierra Club leaders disappointed, including Cara Fogler, managing senior analyst at the Sierra Club. She coauthored the report.
“It’s very disappointing to find we’re at a lower score than in the first year,” she said. Fogler wasn’t surprised, pointing out the Trump administration and Republicans in congress have pushed what she called an “anti-renewables, pro-fossil fuels agenda.”
“We have a new federal administration that’s doing everything in their power to send utilities in a direction away from cleaner power,” Fogler said. “They’re doing away with everything in the Inflation Reduction Act that supported clean energy. They’re straight-up challenging clean energy, as we’ve seen with Revolution Wind,” the New England offshore wind farm that’s now under a stop-work order. “And they’re doing everything in their power to keep fossil fuels online” — for example, through Department of Energy actions that force coal, oil, and gas plants to keep running even after their owners and regulators had agreed on retirement dates.”