Welcome back.
First, we’d like to acknowledge and thank everyone who traveled with us though this tumultuous year. You kept yourselves up to date on climate and energy issues by reading our newsletters, you contacted legislators, you stood with us in the street, and you supported us with donations. It’s slow, hard work, but we’re making tangible progress and, with you, we’re walking in good company.
A lot of reporting these past couple weeks has been retrospective, so it amounts to a useful overview of 2021’s major themes and sets us up for the coming year. The Weymouth compressor station is fully operational and managed to get though the year without another unplanned gas release. But it’s bad infrastructure in the wrong place, so opposition continues. The proposed peaking power plant in Peabody, MA is a similar old-think dinosaur, and we offer Ben Hillman’s latest video to explain why it shouldn’t be built.
Predictably disappointing results from recently concluded COP26 climate talks underscore the fact that governments have yet to rise to the level of action and commitment that meet the urgent demands of our three inseparable crises: climate, environment, and equity. But we’re seeing an increasingly effective trend in litigation, forcing action in areas where political will and diplomacy have failed. For an example of that political failure at a national level, look no farther than the fact that a single coal-loving Democratic Senator (along with every single Republican) has so far stopped the Build Back Better act, leaving the U.S. without desperately needed tools to drive emissions down. In the absence of Federal leadership, a few states and cities continue to show the way. New York City’s recent $3b pension fund divestment from fossil fuels is worth celebrating.
Greening the economy requires a lot of metals for batteries, and obtaining them requires mining and other forms of extraction and processing. Two stories highlight efforts to reduce environmental and social harms, while our Clean Transportation section shows why we’ll need so many batteries so quickly and also discusses how some battery chemistries are more sustainable than others.
During 2021 our changing climate seemed to force just about everyone on the planet to take precautions, take cover, or run for their lives. It’s difficult to find anyone who still believes it’s someone else’s problem. DeSmog Blog’s Nick Cunningham offers an excellent summary of what just happened and why it matters. Meanwhile we gained ground in clean energy and energy storage, while negative forces persist in hyping false solutions like carbon capture and storage, and some utilities take advantage of disruptions to gouge customers. All this while the fossil fuel industry is having a coal moment, largely resulting from our over-dependence on natural gas as a “bridge fuel”, rather than having invested early enough in renewable energy, storage, and grid modernization. So pandemic disruptions made gas temporarily scarce and expensive, and coal is filling the void.
We’ll close out the year by adding another topic to our watch list: waste incineration, or more broadly the whole suite of waste-to-energy technologies. These facilities are sources of nasty, toxic pollution, but bill themselves as producers of renewable energy. Renewable, that is, as long as humans create a nearly limitless supply of waste while failing to reduce, reuse, recycle, or compost a good percentage of it.
For even more environmental news, info, and events, check out the latest newsletter from our colleagues at Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT)!
— The NFGiM Team
PEAKING POWER PLANTS
Outrage over plan for new dirty power plant in Peabody, MA.
By Ben Hillman, YouTube
December 22, 2021
» Watch video
» More about peaking power plants
WEYMOUTH COMPRESSOR STATION
Neighbors dealt another blow in Fore River compressor station fight; court tosses lawsuit
By Jessica Trufant, The Patriot Ledger
December 24, 2021
WEYMOUTH – A state Appeals Court tossed out a lawsuit filed by residents challenging one of the approvals granted for the natural gas compressor station on the banks of the Fore River.
A three-judge panel affirmed a Superior Court judge’s decision that the Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station could not seek judicial review of the approval issued by the state Office of Coastal Zone Management.
The court ruled that the citizens group did not have a right to an agency hearing, and therefore did not have a right to judicial review.
Alice Arena of the anti-compressor group said the town initially filed the appeal and the citizens group intervened. But Arena said the residents were left “out in the ether” when the town dropped its appeal as part of a host community agreement with energy company Enbridge.
The compressor station is part of Enbridge’s Atlantic Bridge project, which expands the company’s natural gas pipelines from New Jersey into Canada. Since the station was proposed in 2015, residents have argued it presents serious health and safety risks.
Arena said several rehearing requests are pending in federal court, and the group’s appeal of the waterways permit will soon be heard in Superior Court.
» Read article
» More about the Weymouth compressor
PROTESTS AND ACTIONS
COP26: Five Key Takeaways on the Rising Tide of Climate Litigation
By L. Delta Merner, Union of Concerned Scientists | Blog
December 22, 2021
Nation-states have been trying for nearly 30 years to address climate change through global diplomacy. Creating mechanisms and processes for making global commitments to address climate change is no easy task and, while a future in which global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5° C) above pre-industrial levels is still scientifically possible, the commitments that governments have made so far will not get us there– and not nearly enough is being done to help communities that are suffering from the impacts of climate change today.
I left COP26 more convinced than ever that climate litigation has an important role to play to help ensure the changes we vitally need to prevent worse impacts from climate change.
Before the Paris Agreement was signed in December 2015, the world was on track for 4° C of warming; after the meetings in Scotland and assuming the commitments nations made there are realized, we are on track for a reality closer to 2.4° C of warming.
Unfortunately, 2.4 degrees would be devastating—and it is not aligned with the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty with a stated goal to limit global warming to well below 2, and as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible, compared to pre-industrial levels. So, change is happening and it is incremental, as the process promised.
During the meetings, speakers repeated that the science is clear. It’s clear that we need to limit emissions. It’s clear where the emissions are coming from. Yet, there’s no question something huge is standing in the way of real change. Standing in those meeting rooms, the sheer influence of the fossil fuel industry at the negotiations was also on clear display.
Over the last five years, the courts have made it clear that they have the power to rule on cases related to climate change and that governments and companies have a legal duty to address climate change, which includes reducing emissions and helping communities prepare and adapt to any unavailable impacts. These decisions are being made based on science, and international and human rights law. The impacts of judicial decisions will continue to grow with new cases and new venues, including increased use of international legal bodies such as the international court of justice.
» Read article
» More about protests and actions
LEGISLATION
» More about legislation
DIVESTMENT
‘Historic’ NYC Pension Fund Fossil Fuel Divestment Heralded as Model for Others
One activist said this is what “every pension fund can and should” do to address the climate crisis.
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
December 22, 2021
In what climate campaigners on Wednesday celebrated as not only a “historic” win but also a model for the rest of the country, New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer and trustees of major public pensions funds announced a $3 billion divestment from fossil fuels.
“We’d like to thank Comptroller Stringer, for his years of public service and his leadership in protecting our pensions and our planet by divesting from fossil fuel investments. Thank you for joining the fight to reduce the money flowing to the world’s most dangerous polluters,” said 350NYC Steering Committee member Dorian Fulvio.
Stand.earth Climate Finance Program director Richard Brooks declared that “once again, New York City is a beacon of progressive climate action.”
“This ahead-of-schedule and unprecedentedly transparent completion of one of the biggest fossil fuel divestments translates words and commitment into real action,” he said. “Every pension fund and investor needs to pay attention: If divestment can be completed in New York, it can and should happen everywhere.”
Stand.earth earlier this month published what it called a “first-of-its-kind” analysis exposing how U.S. public pension funds are “bankrolling the climate crisis.” The advocacy group and fund beneficiaries nationwide responded to the findings by demanding divestment from fossil fuel holdings as well as investment in “just and equitable climate solutions.”
New York City leaders in January 2018 committed to divesting major public pension funds from fossil fuel reserve companies within five years, and have urged others to follow suit.
On Wednesday, Stringer and trustees of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System (NYCERS) and the New York City Board of Education Retirement System (BERS) revealed that those funds “have completed their process of divesting approximately $1.8 billion and $100 million in securities, respectively,” bringing the total for all funds to approximately $3 billion.
» Read article
» More about divestment
GREENING THE ECONOMY
Can a Tiny Territory in the South Pacific Power Tesla’s Ambitions?
Nickel is vital to electric car batteries, but extracting it is dirty and destructive. A plant with a turbulent history in New Caledonia is about to become an experiment in sustainable mining.
By Hannah Beech, New York Times
Photographs by Adam Dean
December 30, 2021
GORO, New Caledonia — From the reef-fringed coast of New Caledonia, the Coral Sea stretches into the South Pacific. Slender native pines, listing like whimsical Christmas trees, punctuate the shoreline. The landscape, one of the most biodiverse on the planet, is astonishingly beautiful until the crest of a hill where a different vista unfolds: a gouged red earth pierced by belching smokestacks and giant trucks rumbling across the lunar-like terrain.
This is Goro, the largest nickel mine on a tiny French territory suspended between Australia and Fiji that may hold up to a quarter of the world’s nickel reserves. It also poses a critical test for Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, which wants to take control of its supply chain and ensure that the minerals used for its car batteries are mined in an environmentally and socially responsible fashion.
Tesla’s strategy, the largest effort by a Western electric vehicle maker to directly source minerals, could serve as a model for a green industry confronting an uncomfortable paradox. While consumers are attracted to electric vehicles for their clean reputation, the process of harvesting essential ingredients like nickel is dirty, destructive and often politically fraught.
Because of its nickel industry, New Caledonia is one of the world’s largest carbon emitters per capita. And mining, which began soon after New Caledonia was colonized in 1853, is intimately linked to the exploitation of its Indigenous Kanak people. The legacy of more than a century of stolen land and crushed traditions has left Goro’s nickel output at the mercy of frequent labor strikes and political protests.
If done right, the approach by Tesla, which has the capacity to churn out close to a million cars a year, could lead the way in setting global standards for the electric vehicle revolution, in yet another convention-defying move by the company’s enigmatic founder, Elon Musk. It also provides Western car companies a path to begin sidestepping China, which currently dominates the production of electric vehicle batteries.
If done wrong, Goro will serve as a cautionary tale of how difficult it is to achieve true sustainability. “Going green” or “acting local” are nice bumper stickers for a Tesla. Meeting these ideals, however, will require not just cash and innovation but also savvy about one of the most remote places on earth, a scattering of French-ruled islands hovering on the cusp of independence. Some of the world’s biggest nickel miners have tried to profit at Goro — and failed.
» Read article
Chile Rewrites Its Constitution, Confronting Climate Change Head On
Chile has lots of lithium, which is essential to the world’s transition to green energy. But anger over powerful mining interests, a water crisis and inequality has driven Chile to rethink how it defines itself.
By Somini Sengupta, New York Times
Photographs by Marcos Zegers
December 28, 2021
SALAR DE ATACAMA, Chile — Rarely does a country get a chance to lay out its ideals as a nation and write a new constitution for itself. Almost never does the climate and ecological crisis play a central role.
That is, until now, in Chile, where a national reinvention is underway. After months of protests over social and environmental grievances, 155 Chileans have been elected to write a new constitution amid what they have declared a “climate and ecological emergency.”
Their work will not only shape how this country of 19 million is governed. It will also determine the future of a soft, lustrous metal, lithium, lurking in the salt waters beneath this vast ethereal desert beside the Andes Mountains.
Lithium is an essential component of batteries. And as the global economy seeks alternatives to fossil fuels to slow down climate change, lithium demand — and prices — are soaring.
Mining companies in Chile, the world’s second-largest lithium producer after Australia, are keen to increase production, as are politicians who see mining as crucial to national prosperity. They face mounting opposition, though, from Chileans who argue that the country’s very economic model, based on extraction of natural resources, has exacted too high an environmental cost and failed to spread the benefits to all citizens, including its Indigenous people.
And so, it falls to the Constitutional Convention to decide what kind of country Chile wants to be. Convention members will decide many things, including: How should mining be regulated, and what voice should local communities have over mining? Should Chile retain a presidential system? Should nature have rights? How about future generations?
Around the world, nations face similar dilemmas — in the forests of central Africa, in Native American territories in the United States — as they try to tackle the climate crisis without repeating past mistakes. For Chile, the issue now stands to shape the national charter. “We have to assume that human activity causes damage, so how much damage do we want to cause?” said Cristina Dorador Ortiz, a microbiologist who studies the salt flats and is in the Constitutional Convention. “What is enough damage to live well?”
Indeed the questions facing this Convention aren’t Chile’s alone. The world faces the same reckoning as it confronts climate change and biodiversity loss, amid widening social inequities: Does the search for climate fixes require re-examining humanity’s relationship to nature itself?
“We have to face some very complex 21st century problems,” said Maisa Rojas, a climate scientist at the University of Chile. “Our institutions are, in many respects, not ready.”
» Read article
» More about greening the economy
CLIMATE
2021: Year in Review for Climate Change Wins and Losses
As the climate crisis worsens, the calls for more aggressive action grow louder. 2021 saw more business as usual, industry obfuscation and delay, but also some reasons for optimism.
By Nick Cunningham, DeSmog Blog
December 22, 2021
As 2021 comes to a close, we look back on a year that was full of climate chaos, relentless oil industry propaganda, and frustrating progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But 2021 also saw a significant number of victories against the expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. and around the world, and some glimmers of hope for climate action.
The year started with a conspiracy-fueled coup plot on the U.S. government by President Trump and his supporters in what was ultimately a failed attempt to stay in power. Two weeks later, President Biden was sworn into office, and he quickly signed a flurry of executive orders that included the cancelation of the Keystone XL pipeline and a pause on new oil and gas leases on federal lands. Those moves signaled an intention to prioritize climate change during the Biden era after years of giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.
But the oil industry and its allies fought hard this year to delay meaningful climate policy, part of a decades-long campaign to protect corporate profits at the expense of people and the planet. Campaigns of misinformation and misleading PR continue to characterize public discourse around energy and climate change, even as those corporate strategies and tactics evolve.
On a hopeful note, renewable energy and electric vehicles made substantial strides, putting the entrenched fossil fuel industry on the defensive. Looking forward, the clean energy transition will continue to progress even absent big federal policy. And strong grassroots movements once again demonstrated their ability to stop major oil and gas pipeline projects around the country, even against steep odds.
» Blog editor’s note: This is an excellent summary and analysis, and well worth reading the whole article!
» Read article
The Year in Climate Photos
From the president’s desk to protests and disasters around the world, photos showed climate change is always easy to see but sometimes hard to look at.
By Katelyn Weisbrod, Inside Climate News
December 27, 2021
» Blog editor’s note: This is a roundup of Inside Climate News’ biggest stories from the past year. It includes striking photos, and also links to related articles.
» Read article
» More about climate
CLEAN ENERGY
Massachusetts taps Vineyard Wind, Mayflower Wind to deliver an additional 1.6 GW
By Iulia Gheorghiu, Utility Dive
December 20, 2021
Massachusetts on Friday announced the selection of two offshore wind projects totaling 1,600 MW of new capacity, bringing the state to 3,200 MW of a 5,600 MW offshore wind procurement goal by 2027.
The state’s third offshore wind procurement awarded two developers that are already working on large-scale projects in the area, Vineyard Wind and Mayflower Wind, doubling the amount of offshore wind secured by the state.
As of Friday, U.S. states have procured over 17,100 MW of offshore wind, nearly double the January total of 9,100 MW, according to the Business Network for Offshore Wind.
Massachusetts is also aiming to build up the supply chain, drawing investments to ports in Salem and Falls River, and supporting the construction of a cable facility at Brayton Point, through the latest contracts.
“Offshore wind is the centerpiece of Massachusetts’ climate goals and our effort to achieve Net Zero emissions in 2050, and this successful procurement will build on our national clean energy leadership and the continued development of a robust offshore wind supply chain in the Commonwealth,” Kathleen Theoharides, secretary of the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said in a statement.
» Read article
Inside Clean Energy: Here Are 5 States that Took Leaps on Clean Energy Policy in 2021
While federal policy fell short of expectations, many states had high ambitions and delivered results.
By Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News
December 23, 2021
It’s understandable if people are feeling dour during this unseasonably warm December when, once again, the U.S. Congress has failed to pass major climate legislation.
But while the federal government might have failed in pushing through the Build Back Better bill, with its many climate provisions, 2021 has seen some long-awaited successes in the states.
Five states (Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, North Carolina and Rhode Island) passed laws requiring a shift to 100 percent carbon-free electricity or net-zero emissions. And Washington State passed a law that takes steps to implement its 2019 and 2020 climate and clean energy laws.
Several other states moved forward, even if they didn’t pass their own versions of “100 percent” laws. Colorado and Maryland are examples of states that are making progress on climate and clean energy through a series of smaller, targeted actions, rather than swinging for the fences on single pieces of legislation.
» Read article
» More about clean energy
ENERGY STORAGE
Australian discovered graphene material could be key to low-cost next-gen batteries
By Michael Mazengarb, Renew Economy
December 22, 2021
Australian researchers have struck a deal to commercialise a new next-generation graphene material they say could unlock cheaper and better performing lithium-ion batteries.
Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES), based at the University of Wollongong, say they have discovered a new form of graphene, called ‘Edge Functionalised Graphene’ (EFG), which is both highly conductive and processable for use in a range of electronics.
This includes lithium-ion batteries, with the innovative graphene material promising to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of battery technology used in energy storage devices and electric vehicles.
The research team, which included a collaboration with the Australian National Fabrication Facility – itself based at Melbourne’s Monash University – says the inclusion of graphene material in battery designs could help improve battery lifetimes and charging speeds by improving the conductivity of battery components.
» Read article
» Caution: Graphene has potential for health and environmental harm
Volta bets on space technology for battery storage fire prevention
By Jason Plautz, Utility Dive
December 21, 2021
Energy storage developer Volta Energy Products last week announced a three-year deployment order with San Diego-based KULR Technology Group to apply KULR’s thermal safety solutions — initially designed for space missions — to energy storage.
KULR’s passive propagation resistant (PPR) solution suite — designed to stop lithium-ion battery failures from spiraling out of control without external fire suppression — has been used on NASA missions. The system prevents cell-to-cell thermal runaway and contains any fire and debris inside a battery pack protection, turning the system off to prevent any spread in damage.
The partnership between KULR and Volta parent company Viridi Parente marks the first application of PPR for energy storage and will see Volta deploy up to 1,000 new storage units with the safety technology. Viridi Parente CEO Jon Williams said the “failsafe system” can make energy storage safer and less expensive for a variety of residential and business uses by limiting the need for external fire suppression tools.
Although lithium-ion batteries are the dominant energy storage technology on the market because of their cost and availability of materials, they do carry safety risks. One of the biggest concerns is thermal runaway, where a cell in a lithium-ion battery pack overheats and causes a chain reaction of other overheated cells, resulting in a fire or explosion. While any number of factors can contribute to a cell overheating, experts say that preventing those failures from escalating is key for safety.
“For a pack system to be in someone’s home or a hospital or a daycare center or a university or gas station or even an accountant’s office, that pack has to be failsafe,” Williams said. “When everything fails, will it be safe? Getting there is critically important at a macro level to expand storage for renewables, but on a micro level for Volta, this is the most significant product we will have on the market.”
» Read article
» More about energy storage
CLEAN TRANSPORTATION
In an East Coast first, New Jersey will phase out diesel trucks
New Jersey joins California, Oregon, and Washington in setting ambitious goals to electrify trucks by 2035.
By María Paula Rubiano A., Grist
December 23, 2021
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection earlier this week adopted a rule to phase out diesel-powered trucks – meaning anything bigger than a delivery van – starting in 2025. Based on California’s Advanced Clean Trucks rule, or ACT, New Jersey’s policy will require between 40 to 75 percent of new truck sales in the state be pollution-free, zero-emission by 2035.
“New Jersey is already experiencing the adverse impacts of climate change, but we have the power and obligation to reduce its worsening in the years ahead by acting now to limit our emissions of climate pollutants,” Shawn LaTourette, the state’s commissioner for the Department of Environmental Protection, said in a press release about the new rule.
Contributing to about 40 percent of New Jersey’s total carbon emissions, the transportation sector is the largest greenhouse gas source in the state. In turn, the almost 423,000 medium and heavy trucks that make up NJ’s fleet represent about 20 percent of vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, and Union of Concerned Scientists analyzing the benefits of implementing the rule. These vehicles are also responsible for large quantities of pollutants, including nitrogen oxide and particulate matter, which have been linked to multiple health issues like premature deaths, asthma, pulmonary cancer, and cardiovascular disease.
» Read article
We ranked 3 types of EV batteries to find the most efficient and sustainable one
Lithium vs sodium vs solid-state batteries
By Ioanna Lykiardopoulou, The Next Web
December 28, 2021
Amidst the booming influx of electric vehicles worldwide, automakers and tech companies have been focusing on optimizing the most vital and expensive part of EVs: the batteries.
They aren’t all alike, and manufacturers use a range of different kinds of batteries. So we’ve decided to select and rank the three most prominent (or promising) battery types: lithium, solid-state, and sodium-ion batteries.
We’ll compare the batteries using four criteria: safety, energy density and charging time, sustainability, and price.
But before we begin, let’s brush up the basics we need to know.
Lithium-ion and solid-state batteries are very much alike. Both types use lithium to produce electrical energy and they have an anode (the battery’s negative terminal), a cathode (the battery’s positive terminal), and an electrolyte, which helps transfer ions from the cathode to the anode and vice versa.
They primarily differ in the state of the electrolyte: lithium-ion batteries use liquid electrolytes and solid-state batteries use solid electrolytes.
As for sodium-ion batteries, imagine the exact same structure — the only difference is that sodium ions replace lithium ions.
And now that we’ve laid the basis, let’s rank these battery types on our selected criteria:
» Read article
» More about clean transportation
CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE
Scientist: CO2 Pipelines are a ‘scheme’
By Elijah Helton, nwestiowa.com
December 27, 2021
Climate change is the purported catalyst for the multibillion-dollar pipelines set to scuttle across Iowa, but environmental experts say the ag projects smell like fertilizer.
Chris Jones is an environmental engineering researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He argues that the carbon-capture pipelines — namely the Midwest Carbon Express and the Heartland Greenway — are more economical than ecological.
“This is more of a scheme to make money, and so, if we’re really serious about climate change and we’re going to use public dollars to address that, then we should focus our efforts on long-term strategies that are going to reduce the emissions,” he said.
Jones, like many others opposed to the pipeline, points out that the corporate interests behind the Midwest Carbon Express and Heartland Greenway are the ones poised to profit most off the nominally low-carbon biofuels.
“This is more of a strategy — it’s a lifeboat, if you will — for ethanol, which is now under some threat from electric vehicles emerging in their marketplace,” Jones said. “That’s what’s driving this.”
» Read article
The cash behind carbon removal: Big Oil, tech and taxpayers
By Corbin Hiar, E&E News
December 17, 2021
After making his mark in the advertising world, Andrew Shebbeare wanted to help the rest of the globe. It was 2018, a few years after the 500-person firm he’d helped found had been bought by the ad industry’s largest agency.
“The question was, where can I make the most difference?” Shebbeare recalled in an interview last week. The audacious answer he eventually settled on: bankrolling startups working to reverse climate change.
Shebbeare and the other United Kingdom-based founders of Counteract Partners Ltd. are part of a wave of investors betting on the world-saving potential of small, privately held carbon dioxide removal companies.
To remove heat-trapping CO2 from the atmosphere, the firms use nature-based approaches, like planting carbon-hungry trees and cover crops, or engineered systems, which can deploy fans, solvents and pipes to trap carbon molecules and inject them underground.
The startups are part of a burgeoning sector attracting billions of dollars from interests as varied as oil major Exxon Mobil Corp., movie star Leonardo DiCaprio and the U.S. government.
Once a theoretical tool to tackle climate change, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has now become a necessity.
To have a shot at avoiding the collapse of coral reef ecosystems, widespread extreme heat waves and other impacts associated with warming of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the world will need to remove more than 5 billion tons of carbon from the air annually by midcentury, according to the most optimistic scenario in the latest United Nations climate report. By comparison, all the world’s forests combined currently offset 7.5 billion tons of CO2 each year, a recent peer-reviewed analysis found.
Then in the latter half of the century, the U.N. data shows billions more tons of yearly carbon removals would be needed — even as emissions fall. The slower emissions decline, the more need there would be for future CO2 removals.
» Read article
» More about carbon capture and storage
ELECTRIC UTILITIES
‘Anecdotal evidence’ points to price gouging during winter storm Uri, NERC official says
Robert Walton, Utility Dive
December 22, 2021
There is “anecdotal evidence” of natural gas price gouging in Texas during February’s winter storm Uri, according to an official with the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC). Millions were left without electricity during the storm as power plants struggled to obtain fuel and freezing temperatures halted some wind production.
Wellhead freeze-offs accounted for a large portion of the gas issues, as well as, to a lesser extent, power outages at compressor stations that move gas through pipelines, NERC Chief Technical Advisor Thomas Coleman said during a presentation on Friday to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
Texas regulators are rushing to make grid and market improvements ahead of potential freezing temperatures this winter. On Thursday, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) approved changes to the state’s wholesale markets intended to improve reliability when electricity supplies become scarce.
Coleman’s presentation to an ERCOT working group sheds new light on February’s outages across Texas and the U.S Southwest, and raises questions about whether consumers were cheated by gas producers.
A November joint report by NERC and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission concluded that a combination of freezing and fuel issues caused about three-quarters of the unplanned generating unit outages, derates and failures to start in February. Of those, gas-fired units experienced 58% of all generator issues.
Most of the problem came from frozen gas facilities and, to a lesser extent, gas compressor facilities that lost power when electricity companies cut power.
» Read article
» Read the NERC-FERC joint report
» More about electric utilities
FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY
Coal isn’t dying yet. 2021 brought a record surge in use.
As much of the world emerged from lockdown, coal stepped in to meet energy needs.
By María Paula Rubiano A., Grist
December 17, 2021
In the span of a year, coal power generation went from a historic drop to an all-time high.
In 2021, global electricity generation from coal increased by nine percent, the highest in history, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency, or IEA. Most of that increase came from power plants in China and India, where the need for electricity jumped by nine and 12 percent, respectively. According to the IEA, Europe saw a 12 percent increase while the U.S. went up by 17 percent – despite nearly a decade of declines in coal power generation in both regions.
“Coal and emissions from coal are stubborn,” said IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol in a press call. “Without strong and immediate actions by governments to tackle coal emissions – in a way that is fair, affordable and secure for those affected – we will have little chance, if any at all, of limiting global warming.”
According to the IEA’s projections, as more economies recover from the pandemic, coal demand will increase, peaking in 2022 and staying elevated until at least 2024.
The IEA says the report should serve as a reality check of government policies, which they say are insufficient to curb coal use and its carbon emissions. The report, Fatih Berol says, “is a worrying sign of how far off track the world is in its efforts to put emissions into decline towards net zero.”
» Read article
» Read the IEA report
» More about fossil fuels
WASTE INCINERATION
Burned: Why Waste Incineration Is Harmful
By Daniel Rosenberg, Veena Singla, and Darby Hoover, NRDC | Expert Blog
July 19, 2021
Since the Biden administration took office, Congress is considering bills to fund infrastructure, tackle plastic pollution, and combat climate change. While legislative action is welcome, Congress must avoid ideas disguised as environmental advances that actually threaten public health and the environment. One example is the bundle of troubling technologies that all involve waste incineration, such as “waste-to-energy” or many forms of “chemical recycling” (processes frequently used to convert plastics into fuel that is then burned). These technologies are touted as being environmentally beneficial by various industries, but waste incineration—even if it’s masquerading as “chemical recycling”—is a false solution that Congress should firmly reject.
Regardless of what is being burned (mixed municipal solid waste, plastic, outputs from “chemical recycling”), waste incineration creates and/or releases harmful chemicals and pollutants, including:
- Air pollutants such as particulate matter, which cause lung and heart diseases
- Heavy metals such as lead and mercury, which cause neurological diseases
- Toxic chemicals, such as PFAS and dioxins, which cause cancer and other health problems
These chemicals and pollutants enter the air, water and food supply near incinerators and get into people’s bodies when they breathe, drink, and eat contaminants.
» Read article
» More about waste incineration
» Learn more about Pipeline projects
» Learn more about other proposed energy infrastructure
» Sign up for the NFGiM Newsletter for events, news and actions you can take
» DONATE to help keep our efforts going!
Campaigners Say Biden ‘Deserves Lump of Coal This Christmas’ for Broken Climate Promises
Is There Something Amiss With the Way the EPA Tracks Methane Emissions from Landfills?
Look Ahead, Pittsfield: What you should know about the local ‘peaker’ plant permit on the line this week
Meet the unstoppable entrepreneur bringing solar, EVs and jobs to his Native community and beyond
Canada’s Tar Sands: Destruction So Vast and Deep It Challenges the Existence of Land and People
No Fracked Gas in Mass 