(File Photo of Police Lights)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Greene Township, PA) Pennsylvania State Police in Beaver report that a three-vehicle crash occurred on State Route 168 in Greene Township on December 29th, 2024. At 6:51 p.m., an unidentified seventy-five-year-old man from Beaver swerved his 2013 Nissan Altima to avoid a parked car on the right shoulder of the road. The man hit both a 2012 Mack Truck and a 1981 Trail Bay Travel Trailer. There were no reported injuries and the Nissan was towed following the crash.

(File Photo of Police Lights)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Raccoon Township, PA) Pennsylvania State Police in Beaver report that a two-vehicle crash occurred in Raccoon Township on December 4th, 2024. At 4:12 p.m., an unidentified driver and vehicle hit a 2008 Chevrolet driven by sixty-seven-year-old Jeffrey Mcgaffic of Beaver on Green Garden Road. The rearview mirror on the driver’s side of Mcgaffic’s Chevrolet was hit. No charges were filed by police after the incident. 

(File Photo of Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Badge)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Greene Township, PA) An arrest took place in Greene Township on Saturday after someone harassed three people. Pennsylvania State Police in Beaver report that at 2:38 p.m., the person that was arrested assaulted three victims and one of them suffered a minor injury. The identities of the victims and the arrestee were withheld. Three counts of summary for harassment were charged to the arrestee by police. 

File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – A sign on a door at The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania at the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa., Feb. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republicans put Pennsylvania and Wisconsin back in the win column in the 2024 presidential race, and they’re hoping that momentum carries over to contests this year that will determine whether their state Supreme Courts retain left-leaning majorities or flip to conservative control.

The outcome can be pivotal in deciding cases related to abortion, election disputes, voting laws and redistricting for Congress and their state legislatures.

Money is pouring in and expected to eclipse the $70 million-plus combined spent on the states’ Supreme Court races two years ago.

The Wisconsin race has caught the attention of Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO who is a close ally of President Donald Trump, and has surfaced tensions related to Trump’s pardons of his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“For both sides, these races seem much, much higher profile than they used to be,” said J.J. Abbott, who runs Commonwealth Communications, a progressive advocacy group in Pennsylvania.

State Supreme Court races have become some of the most expensive and bitterly fought over the past few years, given how central those courts are in deciding divisive issues.

Republicans are intent on flipping the courts

Republicans are optimistic after Trump won both states in November.

The courts there have played major roles since both states have divided governments, with Democratic governors and legislatures that are either fully or partially under Republican control.

In the past couple years alone, liberal majorities on both states’ high courts handed victories to Democrats in cases involving the boundaries of Wisconsin’s legislative districts and Pennsylvania’s congressional districts.

Victories for Democrats or their allies in voting rights cases also included overturning Wisconsin’s ban on absentee ballot drop boxes and ensuring Pennsylvanians can vote by provisional ballot if their mail ballot is rejected.

Musk cited the Wisconsin drop box ruling, which came last July, in a message posted this past week on his social platform X: “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!”

A recount, nonpartisan audit and report by a conservative law firm all affirmed that there was no widespread fraud in Wisconsin in 2020, when absentee ballot boxes were in use, and that Democrat Joe Biden won the state’s presidential contest.

The Democratic-supported candidate in Wisconsin’s officially nonpartisan race quickly seized on Musk’s involvement to make a fundraising pitch.

Liberals also were highlighting comments from the Republican-backed candidate earlier this month saying those who stormed the U.S. Capitol never got “a fair shot” in court. Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer who was on duty during the attack, plans news conferences in Wisconsin on Tuesday to criticize the remarks critical of the prosecutions.

In the upcoming races, Democrats say they will portray the state high courts as a bulwark against the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump administration and a GOP-controlled Congress.

The issue of abortion rights is expected to play a major role this year, as it did in high court races last year and in 2023’s state Supreme Court campaigns in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Those races took place the year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended nearly a half-century of a constitutional right to abortion.

Early Wisconsin race will test nation’s political mood

Wisconsin’s election is April 1 to replace a retiring liberal justice and will decide whether liberals or conservatives will control a 4-3 majority.

Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks spending in elections, said the race could go either way in a state where voters handed narrow victories in November to Trump, a Republican, and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat.

“After the presidential election season, people around the country are going to be looking at Wisconsin as a bellwether, as a litmus test of what the mood of the country is,” Ramos said.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party has endorsed Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general, is endorsed by various conservative officeholders and groups.

Significant cases looming in Wisconsin’s courts include challenges to the state’s 1849 abortion ban and a 2011 law that all but ended collective bargaining for teachers and other public sector workers.

Big spending expected from outside groups

In Pennsylvania, November’s general election will feature three Democrats running to retain their seats, putting Democrats’ 5-2 majority on the line. All three justices — Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht — face a “yes” or “no” vote to win another 10-year term.

Pending in Pennsylvania courts are cases that challenge laws limiting the use of Medicaid to cover the cost of abortions and requiring certain mail-in ballots to be disqualified.

In 2023, business associations, political party campaign arms, Planned Parenthood, partisan advocacy groups, labor unions, lawyers’ groups, environmental organizations and wealthy GOP donors, including Richard Uihlein and Jeffrey Yass, pushed spending above $70 million in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

The Wisconsin race alone topped $51 million, breaking national records for spending on a judicial race.

Abortion rights were the dominant theme in that contest, won by a Democratic-backed judge whose victory gave liberals majority control of the court for the first time in 15 years.

Wisconsin’s race this year is expected to cost even more, with the two candidates already raising more than was brought in at this point in 2023.

Schimel, in an interview last year on WISN-AM, said outside groups “are committed to making sure we take back the majority on this court” and that he was confident “we’re going to have the money to do the things we have to do to win this.”

He recently launched a $1.1 million television ad buy statewide, marking the first spending on TV ads in the race. Crawford went on the air a week later.

Spending exceeded $22 million in Pennsylvania’s 2023 contest won by the Democrat, whose campaign focused on attackingrulings by the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

Both sides strategize on overcoming voter fatigue

Wisconsin Democratic strategist Melissa Baldauff said she thinks voter fatigue is a concern for both sides in the Supreme Court race there, with the election coming just months after the state was inundated with TV ads, candidate appearances, direct mail and phone calls in the presidential race.

The best strategy is for their candidate to travel the state and meet directly with voters, Baldauff said.

“You can’t ever underestimate the power of getting around and talking to people and literally meeting people where they are,” she said.

Michelle McFall, the Democratic Party chair in Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County, said the coming retention races dominated talk at a recent meeting of the state Democratic Party.

She said Democrats were concerned their voters will become distracted by Trump’s actions as president — “because it’s what we do” — and that party leaders need to keep the focus on defending their court majority.

They need to boost efforts to reach both urban and rural voters and take lessons from Trump’s winning campaign to use new and unconventional pathways to get their message out, McFall said.

Republicans say it’s too early to know how much money will arrive to boost any campaign to contest the retention races. The success of a “No” campaign could depend on whether the GOP marshals high-level support.

“One question,” said GOP insider Charlie Gerow, “is how big will President Trump weigh in on this issue.”

File Photo: Source for Photo: A data center owned by Amazon Web Services, front right, is under construction next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Berwick, Pa., on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly, avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else.

It’s raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it’s fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it, and quickly.

Front and center is the data center that Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania.

The arrangement between the plant’s owners and AWS — called a “behind the meter” connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant’s capacity — to the data center. That’s enough to power more than a half-million homes.

That leaves the deal and others that likely would follow in limbo. It’s not clear when FERC, which blocked the deal on a procedural ground, will take up the matter again or how the change in presidential administrations might affect things.

“The companies, they’re very frustrated because they have a business opportunity now that’s really big,” said Bill Green, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative. “And if they’re delayed five years in the queue, for example — I don’t know if it would be five years, but years anyway — they might completely miss the business opportunity.”

What’s driving demand for energy-hungry data centers

The rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence has fueled demand for data centers that need power to run servers, storage systems, networking equipment and cooling systems.

That’s spurred proposals to bring nuclear power plants out of retirement, develop small modular nuclear reactors and build utility-scale renewable installations or new natural gas plants. In December, California-based Oklo announced an agreement to provide 12 gigawatts to data center developer Switch from small nuclear reactors powered by nuclear waste.

Federal officials say fast development of data centers is vital to the economy and national security, including to keep pace with China in the artificial intelligence race.

For AWS, the deal with Susquehanna satisfies its need for reliable power that meets its internal requirements for sources that don’t emit planet-warming greenhouse gases, like coal, oil or gas-fueled plants.

Big Tech also wants to stand up their centers fast. But tech’s voracious appetite for energy comes at a time when the power supply is already strained by efforts to shift away from planet-warming fossil fuels.

They can build data centers in a couple years, said Aaron Tinjum of the Data Center Coalition. But in some areas, getting connected to the congested electricity grid can take four years, and sometimes much more, he said.

Plugging directly into a power plant would take years off their development timelines.

What’s in it for power providers

In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid. Talen Energy, Susquehanna’s majority owner, projected the deal would bring as much as $140 million in electricity sales in 2028, though it didn’t disclose exactly how much AWS will pay for the power.

The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators, in particular, are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas as well as state-subsidized solar and wind energy.

Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else.

FERC’s big decision

A favorable ruling from FERC could open the door to many more huge data centers and other massive power users like hydrogen plants and bitcoin miners, analysts say.

FERC’s 2-1 rejection in November was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren’t ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study.

In the meantime, the agency is hearing arguments for and against the Susquehanna-AWS deal.

Monitoring Analytics, the market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid, wrote in a filing to FERC that the impact would be “extreme” if the Susquehanna-AWS model were extended to all nuclear power plants in the territory.

Energy prices would increase significantly and there’s no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix, it said.

Separately, two electric utility owners — which make money in deregulated states from building out the grid and delivering power — have protested that the Susquehanna-AWS arrangement amounts to freeloading off a grid that ordinary customers pay to build and maintain. Chicago-based Exelon and Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power say the Susquehanna-AWS arrangement would allow AWS to avoid $140 million a year that it would otherwise owe.

Susquehanna’s owners say the data center won’t be on the grid and question why it should have to pay to maintain it. But critics contend that the power plant itself is benefiting from taxpayer subsidies and ratepayer-subsidized services, and shouldn’t be able to strike deals with private customers that could increase costs for others.

FERC’s decision will have “massive repercussions for the entire country” because it will set a precedent for how FERC and grid operators will handle the waiting avalanche of similar requests from data center companies and nuclear plants, said Jackson Morris of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Stacey Burbure, a vice president for American Electric Power, told FERC at a hearing in November that it needs to move quickly.

“The timing of this issue is before us,” she said, “and if we take our typical five years to get this perfect, it will be too late.”