“Unleash energy” has become a popular and frequently used political phrase by Republicans as they prioritize energy production in 2025. Producers and consumers could welcome additional supply if it lowers costs.
The type of energy that producers would “unleash” depends on the individual projects, transformations, and challenges.
A dairy farm in southern Nevada has been struggling for a while. Ponderosa Dairy (owned by Rockview Family Farms) has a 2,000-acre farm in Amargosa Valley. Transportation costs and inflation soured profits. And the dairy’s primary milk operator, Meadow Gold, cut the price it paid to the farm by nearly 15 percent.
Margins were already tight. That combination led to difficult decisions.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal pointed to challenges nearly two years ago for the farm at its 10,000 cow, 200 employee operation. This article laid out how the farm struggled to get paid enough for its milk production.
Rockview Family Farms has been working on a deal with Balanced Rock Power to convert the dairy farm into a solar energy facility. The farm operation could move north. There are potentially logistical and financial benefits to the move.
A solar facility in the southern part of the state may require less water. And a new farm operation to the north could have a larger water supply and lower transportation costs, according to a follow-up story from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Meanwhile, operators of an ethanol plant in southern Minnesota hope for better market conditions in the future. Green Plains temporarily closed its facility in Fairmont, a town of about 10,000 near the Minnesota-Iowa border.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that a Green Plains spokesperson said that the decision to pause operations resulted “from an over-supplied ethanol market, a weaker energy complex and elevated local corn basis levels — the difference between cash and futures prices — following spring flooding last year.”
The company is waiting on two things, according to the article: improved margins and a carbon sequestration project going online.
RELATED: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune looks at the challenging economic conditions that Omaha-based Green Plains said that it experienced in 2024 and the optimism that it has for carbon sequestration. Read that story here.
Fifty-five people at that Green Plains plant may have to look for work instead of waiting to see when, and if, that facility reopens.
It is sheep that have been put to work in Texas in an emerging industry: solar grazing. SB Energy operates the fifth-largest solar project in the United States near Austin. Nearly 3,000 sheep provide landscaping services on the solar farm.
The Associated Press tracked more than 60 solar grazing projects in the country with more than half the states operating at least one.
