$15B steel plant in Iowa

STEELMAKING

• Mesabi Metallics announces plans for a $15 billion steel mill in Iowa that would be supplied by the company’s iron ore mine in Minnesota and powered by gas and electricity, a departure from traditional coal-fired furnaces. (Canary Media)

FOSSIL FUELS

• Ameren Missouri’s new 20-year power plan looks to build nine gas plants — up from two in its 2023 plan — over the next two decades and scale back the percentage of power from renewables to meet data center demand forecasts. (St. Louis Public Radio)
• DTE Energy and Consumers Energy plan to build $10 billion in new gas plants as part of their long-term power plans, though it remains unclear the extent to which data centers are driving those investments. (MLive)

DATA CENTERS

• Geronimo Power’s plan for a 540-MW data center would use nearly twice as much power as a second data center planned near Fargo, North Dakota. (North Dakota Monitor)

COAL

• County officials outside Cincinnati sue Duke Energy and the owner of a long-shuttered coal plant along the Ohio River for failing to clean up four large fly ash pits that raise pollution concerns. (WKRC)

SOLAR

• Cleveland plans solar projects totaling 9 MW on two former landfills, adding to a previous project built with federal funds during the Biden administration. (Solar Power World)

EMISSIONS

• Automakers welcome President Donald Trump’s rollback of fuel economy standards for gas-powered cars, saying the move expands consumer access to affordable vehicles, although the rule itself says the change will also drive up refueling costs for drivers. (Associated Press, Politico)

UTILITIES

• Business interests are highly likely to file a legal challenge against a Michigan ballot proposal that would ban political contributions from large utilities, as polling shows strong voter support for the proposal. (Crain’s Detroit)
• Ann Arbor, Michigan, leaders plan to publicly oppose a local ballot initiative that marks the first step in potentially creating a city-owned utility, saying such a move would cost residents hundreds of millions of dollars. (WXYZ)

GRID

• A NIPSCO executive says the utility’s grid wasn’t prepared to withstand the strong storms that battered Northwest Indiana and caused prolonged outages in August, as Indiana lawmakers pursue policy changes. (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

OIL & GAS

• Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen is among supporters of a federal diesel export ban as a way to ease sky-high diesel prices, though other members of the state’s congressional delegation oppose the move as a short-term fix that may not lower prices. (Nebraska Examiner)