Tag Archives: Pittsfield Generating

Weekly News Check-In 12/10/21

Welcome back.

Less than two weeks before the year’s longest night, we’re providing the modest public service of leading this newsletter with a bit of good news to boost everyone’s spirits – a short article describing a few things that went pretty well for the planet this past year. Additionally, our own “Put Peakers in the Past” campaign to transition Berkshire County’s three peaking power plants to clean renewables and battery storage took a positive step with a well-attended and well-reported public hearing on the Pittsfield Generating power plant’s air quality permit renewal application. We thank state Senator Adam Hinds, Pittsfield’s state Representative Tricia Farley-Bouvier, and others for their interest, attendance, constructive and informed comments, and support.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel interests keep exploring for new oil and gas deposits – a disruptive process that carries considerable environmental risk. Protesters in South Africa are attempting to prevent Shell from carrying out dangerous seismic blast testing off the ecologically sensitive Wild Coast. And banks keep funding those efforts, even though the divestment movement is growing more effective. But heads up – look for more conservative-leaning states to start passing legislation based on model language provided by Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These bills seek to make it illegal for banks to divest from fossil fuels – calling it a form of discrimination.

While advances in technology and market forces are driving the world toward a greener economy, moving quickly and efficiently toward that future requires considerable coordination. And that demands better, easier access to massive amounts of energy data that the International Energy Agency (IEA) collects and holds.

On the climate front, scientists have recently identified nitrous oxide as one constituent released from melting permafrost in Siberia. The findings are preliminary but potentially important. Nitrous oxide is a climate super-pollutant with global warming potential about 300 times greater than carbon dioxide.

The Baker administration is picking up the pieces from two recent setbacks related to Massachusetts’ clean energy transition plan. Voters in Maine recently chose to stop a major electricity transmission project that would have brought hydro electric power from Quebec. And the regional Transportation Climate Initiative, intended to cut transportation sector emissions, just collapsed. We looked in on Damage Control.

Since we mentioned hydro power, let’s expand the view. Well-documented environmental and justice issues regarding Quebec hydro (which Massachusetts is trying to access) are also playing out in other hydro electricity projects around the world. For example, existing and planned dam projects in the tropics are directly impacting vulnerable tiger and jaguar populations, driving both cats closer to extinction.

Electric vehicle road trips are about to get easier, now that a group of utilities have formed the National Electric Highway Coalition with the mission to greatly expand the number of fast charging station along major routes throughout the US.

Back at home, that stuff you just received from an online order spent time in a huge warehouse on its way to your door. Warehouses are booming, and now we see a growing urgency to transition them away from natural gas heat. Also in this section, we hear from Chef Jon Kung about why he prefers his induction stovetop over gas.

Wrapping up, we get some perspective on the carbon capture and storage boondoggle and the ambitious (wasteful, crazy?) scheme to lay thousands of miles of high-pressure, hazardous liquid CO2 pipelines across the upper mid-West at taxpayer expense. All while the fossil fuel industry is blaming recent market volatility on the transition to renewable energy.

And because we started with good news, we’ll end with a bit more: British Columbia’s only liquefied natural gas project is in trouble, and things aren’t looking good for its planned expansion or for other Canadian (or US?) LNG export terminals.

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

GOOD NEWS

5 Good Things That Happened for the Planet in 2021
By Linnea Harris, EcoWatch
December 9, 2021

It wasn’t all bad. Here’s some of the good news from this year.

Environmental Rights Amendment Passes in New York
Monarch Populations Are Bouncing Back
Protections Restored to Three Public Lands
The Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement Grows
More People Are Going Plant-Based

» Read article

PEAKING POWER PLANTS

Politicians and activists frustrated with DEP rules that allow business as usual for local ‘peaker’ plant
By Meg Britton-Mehlisch, The Berkshire Eagle
December 7, 2021

PITTSFIELD — Public testimony from residents and environmentalists during a Tuesday night virtual hearing equally reprimanded the operators of a local ”peaker plant” and the state’s Department of Environmental Protection for what they considered out of touch and overly lax emissions regulations.

“It appears the DEP regulations have not been designed to protect the environment by making sure that these higher polluting facilities be the first to close or transition to clean energy,” Jane Winn, the founding executive director of the Berkshire Environmental Action Team, said.

At issue is the air operating permit for Pittsfield Generating Company’s power plant on Merrill Road. These permits, which are issued by the state’s DEP, are reviewed every five years to ensure that the facility is still meeting all state and federal rules around record keeping, facility monitoring and emission limits.

For more than a year, activists from groups like BEAT have waged a public information campaign to educate the public about the health risks that follow “peaker” plants and potential green energy alternatives.

When activists joined with local politicians and residents Tuesday night, they asked the DEP to do two things: deny the permit to the facility or issue a provisional permit that would require the facility switch from natural gas and oil to solar power and battery storage.

The hearing continued for almost an hour despite persistent Zoom bombings that blasted pornographic sounds and racist slurs into the hearing.

Much of the comments during the hearing centered on the space current emission limits give power plants to continue “business as usual” despite Gov. Charlie Baker signing a roadmap for the state to achieve net zero emission by 2050 into law in March. The law would have the state reduce greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030.

“This is the moment when we need to be acting as robustly as possible in redirecting our use of peaker plants and making sure that we’re doing everything we can to reduce our emission and standing up for environmental justice communities,” Hinds said.

“It starts right here, one permit at a time, one plant at a time, one community at a time,” he added.

Farley-Bouvier joined Hinds and Mark in asking the department to let them know what the department needed to incorporate the state’s new direction into permitting processes for facilities like Pittsfield Generating.

“If your response is ‘But the regulations say that we have to do it this way,’ then please let Representative Mark and Senator Hinds and I know what has to be changed in the regulations,” Farley-Bouvier said. “It would be our job to change the regulations to line up with the 2050 roadmap.”
» Read article
» Watch recorded public hearing (Zoom bombs edited out…)

Look Ahead, Pittsfield: What you should know about the local ‘peaker’ plant permit on the line this week
By Meg Britton-Mehlisch, The Berkshire Eagle
December 5, 2021

PITTSFIELD — The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection will hold a hearing Tuesday over a local power plant’s request for the renewal of its operating permit. The hearing is pretty typical stuff for the plant, Pittsfield Generating Company, which has its permit reviewed every five years. But this year, local environmental activists hope this hearing is anything but rote for the plant.

For months, a coalition of environmental activists led by the Berkshire Environmental Action Team has pushed for the closure of the plant or for a redesign that would swap the plant’s use of fossil fuels for clean energy alternatives. That push has gained support from both the Pittsfield Board of Health and local state representatives.

What is a peaker plant? As far as peaker plants go, the Pittsfield Generating plant is pretty typical. The plant is 31 years old and runs on fracked natural gas and oil — a design that’s normal for peaker plants across the state. But that design is the plant’s biggest sticking point with environmentalists.

Last year, the plant produced 3.2 tons of nitrogen oxides and 19,152 tons of carbon dioxide — down 55 percent from the 7.3 tons of nitrogen oxides and 42,321 tons of carbon dioxide the plant produced in 2019 according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Earlier this year, The Eagle’s Danny Jin covered the bevy of potential public health impacts that can come from living in the shadow of these peaker plants. The pollution put out by peaker plants can increase the risk of developing asthma, impair lung function and lower heart health.

What do the opponents want? BEAT has put out a series of talking points to prepare their members for the public comment section of the hearing on Tuesday. In the document, BEAT argues that the state’s Department of Environmental Protection should implement a regulation system to enforce its emissions limits, and that such a system should have been created back in 2016 when emission limits were set.

The main request from the group is to deny the permit for the plant. The group believes that the most environmentally conscious solution is to replace the plant with a battery system powered by clean energy, like solar power. If the DEP decides to grant the permit, BEAT is asking that “it should only be provisional for 1 year on the agreement that [Pittsfield Generating] come up with a transition plan” to a greener energy system within two years.
» Read article

» More about peaker plants

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

‘We Won’t Stop Fighting,’ Vow South African Activists After Judge OKs Shell Seismic Blasting at Sea
“We must do everything we can to undo the destructive colonial legacy of extractivism, until we live in a world where people and the planet come before the profits of toxic fossil fuel companies.”
By Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams
December 6, 2021

South African activists on Monday vowed to keep fighting after a court ruling allowing fossil fuel giant Shell to proceed with massive underwater explosions off the ecologically sensitive Wild Coast, a move environmentalists say would cause “irreparable harm” to marine life.

“We won’t stop fighting,” tweeted Greenpeace Africa following Sunday’s nationwide protests. “Shell must immediately stop oil and gas exploration off S.A.’s Wild Coast.”

Demonstrators from more than 30 organizations—including 350.org, Clean Seas, Extinction Rebellion, The Green Connection, Greenpeace Africa, Oceans Not Oil, and Sea The Bigger Picture—turned out for over 70 protests nationwide, according to The Cape Argus.

At Surfers Corner at Muizenberg Beach in Cape Town, activists carried a giant marionette of a snoek, a snake mackerel found in area waters, and held placards with slogans including “Stop killing our coast” and “To hell with Shell.”

“The purpose of this protest is to send a message to Shell bosses and shareholders to stop the company from carrying out the seismic survey on the Wild Coast,” the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) said in a statement.

In seismic surveys, barrages of powerful sonic pulses are blasted into the ocean floor with airguns; the reflected sound waves are then analyzed to map the seabed for potential oil and gas reserves. The blasts reach more than 250 decibels and kill, injure, and terrorize marine life.

Reinford Sinegugu Zukulu, director of the advocacy group Sustaining the Wild Coast, told the court that the blasting would occur every 10 seconds for five months, would be “louder than a jet plane taking off,” and would be heard underwater for more than 60 miles.

Elaine Mills, a representative of Greenpeace volunteers in Cape Town, told The Cape Argus that the potential destruction “is beyond belief. Really, it’s unimaginable.”

“The harm that [the blasting] can do to marine life is permanent hearing loss, organ rupture as dolphins and whales breach too fast to escape the auditory onslaught, and beach strandings,” she added.
» Read article

» More about protests and actions

DIVESTMENT

Banks Continue To Fund Fossil Fuels Despite Climate Pledges
By Tsvetana Paraskova, Oil Price
December 6, 2021

Despite investor and societal pressure, banks worldwide continue to lend money and underwrite bonds issued by oil, gas, and coal companies, with bond deals in fossil fuels arranged by banks at nearly $250 billion in 2021, Bloomberg data showed on Monday.

JP Morgan financed the largest volume of loans and bonds combined so far this year, followed by Wells Fargo, Citi, RBC, and Mitsubishi UFJ, data as of December 3 compiled by Bloomberg showed.

Wells Fargo has been the biggest lender to the fossil fuel industry this year, with most of its exposure to the sector going to loans for companies.

While environment-conscious investors push for Wall Street banks—and all banks globally as a matter of fact—to shun fossil fuels, major banks say that by continuing to finance oil and gas, they help the sector invest in low-carbon energy solutions that would help decarbonize the global energy system.

“It is really important that our clients take steps to innovate and decarbonize, but we also need to bring capital to the table for the commercialization of those solutions,” Marisa Buchanan, Global Head of Sustainability at JPMorgan Chase & Co, told Bloomberg.

In May this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ said that banks should finance low-carbon climate-resilient projects, not big fossil fuel infrastructure that is not even cost-effective anymore.
» Read article

» More about divestment

LEGISLATION

‘Alarming’: ALEC’s New Model Bill Would Penalize Banks for Divesting From Fossil Fuels
One critic called the proposal, which describes green investment policies as a form of “energy discrimination,” a “desperate attempt by fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists to maintain their profits.”
By Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams
December 8, 2021

Progressives are sounding the alarm about a recently launched right-wing campaign that seeks to preempt green investment policies throughout the United States by portraying the financial sector’s potential turn toward clean energy as discriminatory—and introducing legislation that would punish banks and asset managers for divesting from fossil fuels.

The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which consistently pumps out reactionary bills mostly for state-level Republicans, held its States and Nation Policy Summit last week in San Diego.

In an email obtained and first reported by Alex Kotch of the Center for Media and Democracy, Jason Isaac, director of the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote that “this morning at the ALEC Committee meetings you’ll have the opportunity to push back against woke financial institutions that are colluding against American energy producers.”

The “model policy” in question is the so-called “Energy Discrimination Elimination Act.” In his email, Isaac claimed that “major banks and investment firms are colluding to deny lending and investment in fossil fuel companies, using their market power to force companies to make ‘green’ investments. This model bill proposes a strategy in which states use their collective economic purchasing power to counter the rise of politically motivated and discriminatory investing practices.”

ALEC’s Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force voted unanimously to champion the proposal, a version of which Texas’ far-right Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in June.
» Read article

» More about legislation

GREENING THE ECONOMY

» More about greening the economy

CLIMATE

New Study Shows Siberian Permafrost Releasing Climate Super-Pollutant Nitrous Oxide
By Mitchell Beer, The Energy Mix
December 8, 2021

A permafrost region in East Siberia has emerged as a previously unknown source of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that carries nearly 300 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 100-year span, a team of researchers from the University of Eastern Finland reported yesterday in the journal Nature Communications.

While annual nitrous oxides releases due to human activity have increased 30% by 1980, and alarmed scientists have been paying attention, nitrous emissions from permafrost would be a largely new twist in the effort to get greenhouse gases and the resulting climate emergency under control.

“The nitrous oxide emissions from thawing permafrost represent a poorly known, but potentially globally significant positive feedback to climate change,” the university writes in a release. “Overall, the consequences of nitrogen release from permafrost for Arctic ecosystems have been insufficiently studied and remain poorly understood.”

What’s known is that “rapid Arctic warming and associated permafrost thaw are threatening the large carbon and nitrogen reservoirs of northern permafrost soils, accumulated under cold conditions where the decomposition rate of soil organic matter (SOM) is low,” concludes the science team led by post-doctoral researcher Maija Marushchak. As the permafrost thaws, those pools are decomposing.

While “the fate of soil nitrogen liberated upon permafrost thaw is poorly studied and more complex” than carbon release, the scientists add, “there is evidence that part of liberated nitrogen may be emitted to the atmosphere as nitrogenous gases.”
» Read article

» More about climate

CLEAN ENERGY

Two crucial pillars of the state’s plan to cut carbon emissions have crumbled. Where does it go from here?
By David Abel, Boston Globe
December 7, 2021

A year ago, the Baker administration released a detailed road map to effectively eliminate the state’s carbon emissions by the middle of the century.

Now, just weeks after a United Nations summit in Scotland underscored the need for urgent action to address climate change, crucial pillars of those plans have collapsed.

The ambitious cap-and-invest pact known as the Transportation Climate Initiative, or TCI, promised to cut transportation emissions — the region’s largest source of greenhouse gases — by at least 25 percent over the next decade.

A separate initiative, the New England Clean Energy Connect project, sought to build a $1 billion transmission line in Maine to deliver large amounts of hydropower from Quebec to Massachusetts, which would help to significantly reduce the region’s reliance on fossil fuels.

But, in what some have compared to a “one-two punch,” Maine voters rejected the transmission line, and a few weeks later, the pact to reduce transportation emissions was abandoned.

Without those projects, the Baker administration lacks a clear path to meeting its obligations under the state’s new climate law, which requires officials to cut emissions 50 percent below 1990 levels by the end of the decade and effectively eliminate them by 2050.

“This work to hit climate goals is not for the faint of heart,” said Kathleen Theoharides, the state’s secretary of energy and environmental affairs, in an interview. “It was always going to be difficult to get there. We’re talking about rebuilding an entire economy, and infrastructure and society, around clean energy.”
» Read article

Kathleen Theoharides, Mass. secretary of energy and environmental affairs, sizes up state’s climate goals
By David Abel, Boston Globe
December 7, 2021

After attending last month’s climate summit in Glasgow, Kathleen Theoharides, the state’s secretary of energy and environmental affairs, returned home to find that crucial pillars of the Baker administration’s plan to address climate change had collapsed. Maine voters rejected plans to build a vital transmission line through their state to bring large amounts of hydropower to New England. A few weeks later, Governor Charlie Baker announced he was withdrawing his support for a pact with other East Coast states to reduce transportation emissions. In an interview with Globe environmental reporter David Abel, Theoharides discussed how the administration plans to respond. The interview has been edited and condensed.
» Read interview

» More about clean energy

ENERGY EFFICIENCY

As warehouses take off, they need to kick natural gas
Warehouses have become the king of commercial real estate
By Justine Calma, The Verge
December 3, 2021

Warehouses are increasingly dominating the commercial building landscape in the US, which could have ramifications for efforts to tackle climate change. According to data recently released by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), warehouses and storage units have become the most common commercial buildings in the country — outpacing offices. That has the potential to cause greenhouse gas emissions to climb or tumble, and it largely hinges on whether warehouses can ditch natural gas.

Compared to office buildings, warehouses that store everything from food to clothes tend to rely more heavily on gas heating systems because upfront costs of those systems are cheap, and they’re easy to install, an expert tells The Verge. Even though warehouses typically use less energy than offices, there’s a risk that their reliance on gas could increase the share of emissions coming from commercial buildings, which are already responsible for 16 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas pollution. For the Biden administration to reach its goal of halving America’s planet-heating carbon pollution compared to 2005 levels by 2030, it’ll have to work to clean up warehouse operations.

“If the building sector itself has moved, that means our strategy has to be adapted,” says Bing Liu, building subsector leader at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “If you look at space heating energy use, because [warehouses use] less efficient technologies, it’s actually concerning.”
» Read article

A TikTok food star on why gas stoves are overrated
As the natural gas industry tries to defend its turf, chefs are touting the benefits of induction cooking.
By Rebecca Leber, Vox
December 9, 2021

The American stovetop is increasingly a battleground in a war over the fate of the 70 million buildings powered by natural gas.

On one side of the stove wars is the natural gas utility industry, which has tried to thwart cities considering phasing out gas in buildings. One of its PR strategies has been to hire influencers to tout what they love about cooking with gas to generate public opposition to city efforts.

On the other side are climate and public health advocates who point to years of mounting scientific evidence on what combusting methane in a kitchen does to one’s health. Even the relatively small amount of gas burned by the stove has an outsized effect on indoor health because it releases nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, two pollutants known to increase risks of respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Dozens of cities in California have passed stronger building codes that encourage new construction to be powered by electricity instead of natural gas pipelines. New York City and Eugene, Oregon, may be the next cities to adopt these ordinances.

As more cities move to electricity, what will replace gas stoves? Instead of the electric coiled stoves Americans have learned to hate, there is a newer technology that many chefs prefer: induction.
» Blog editor’s note: watch the short video embedded in this article, where Jon Kung explains and demonstrates induction cooking.
» Read article

» More about energy efficiency

CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

Power companies commit to building nationwide EV charging network
They announced a new coalition today
By Justine Calma, The Verge
December 7, 2021

Over 50 utilities across the US have come together to speed up the build-out of electric vehicle charging stations along the nation’s highways. The new National Electric Highway Coalition was announced today by the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), an association of investor-owned power companies.

Together, the companies aim to “fill charging infrastructure gaps along major travel corridors,” according to a fact sheet. Each utility that’s a member of the coalition must commit “in good faith” to create an EV fast charging network across its service territory “using any approach they see fit” by the end of 2023. The US will need more than 100,000 fast charging ports for the 22 million electric vehicles expected to traverse American roadways by 2030, according to the EEI.

For now, the roughly 1.8 million electric vehicles registered in the US can juice up at just 46,000 public charging stations in the country. Just around 5,600 of those, according to the Department of Energy, are DC fast charging stations that can get an EV battery to 80 percent charged in under an under hour. Easier access to faster charging stations, in particular, could help drive greater EV adoption among wary customers.
» Read article
» Read the National Electric Highway Coalition fact sheet

» More about clean transportation

SITING IMPACTS OF RENEWABLES

Tigers, jaguars under threat from tropical hydropower projects: Study
By Carolyn Cowan, Mongabay
December 9, 2021

The flooding of land for hydroelectric dams has affected more than one-fifth of the world’s tigers (Panthera tigris) and one in two hundred jaguars (Panthera onca), according to the findings of a new study published Dec. 9 in the journal Communications Biology.

Seen by some as a low-carbon solution to global energy needs, large-scale hydropower projects are increasingly prevalent in the tropics, where untapped power potential overlaps with biodiverse landscapes. In recent years, scientists and Indigenous rights groups have criticized many such schemes for failing to fully consider impacts on biodiversity, freshwater connectivity and local communities.

The results of the new study highlight “just how significant the environmental impacts of hydropower can be,” Luke Gibson, a tropical biologist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, and a co-author of the new study, told Mongabay in an email.

Gibson and his colleague, Ana Filipa Palmeirim, used published data on the population density and global distribution of tigers and jaguars to calculate the area of habitat lost and the number of individuals affected by existing and planned hydropower reservoirs.

They found that 13,750 square kilometers (5,300 square miles) of tiger habitat and 25,397 km2 (9,800 mi2) of jaguar habitat have been flooded to create hydroelectric reservoirs. A total of 729 tigers, or 20% of the global population, have been displaced by dams, whereas 915 jaguars, or 0.5% of the global population, have been affected.

“There is simply no science which shows what happens to tigers or jaguars when their habitats are flooded by hydropower reservoirs,” Gibson said. Displaced cats might attempt to survive in suboptimal, unoccupied habitat, or they might move into good quality but occupied habitat where they are likely to experience aggressive territorial encounters. In either scenario, according to Gibson, the chances of survival are very low.

The findings are bad news for the struggling big cats. Both species are suffering population declines due to habitat loss, poaching, shifting prey patterns and the effects of climate change.
» Read article
» Read the study

» More about siting impacts

CARBON CAPTURE & STORAGE

The Future of Fossil Fuels Hinges on Two Huge Midwestern Pipeline Fights
CCS is the fossil-fuel industry’s last-gasp attempt to prevent the U.S. and the world from abandoning fossil energy in favor of cheaper, cleaner solar power.
By Peter Montague, Common Dreams | Opinion
December 9, 2021

The future of the fossil fuel industry depends on an expensive Rube Goldberg technology called carbon capture and storage (CCS), intended to capture billions of tons of hazardous waste carbon dioxide (CO2) from smokestacks and bury it deep underground where optimistic experts say it will remain forever. Pessimistic experts say it won’t work.

The goal is to continue burning fossil fuels for the next 50 years but keep the resulting CO2 out of the atmosphere where it heats the planet, intensifying storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, crop failures, ocean acidification, and rising sea levels. CCS is the fossil-fuel industry’s last-gasp attempt to prevent the U.S. and the world from abandoning fossil energy in favor of cheaper, cleaner solar power.

Back in 2005, a handful of industrialized nations (the so-called G8) agreed to develop CCS technology and since then the U.S. government has worked hard to make it happen but with little success so far.

Adding carbon-capture filters onto a smokestack is expensive and the CCS filters themselves use about 20 percent of a power plant’s energy output—thereby producing more pollution per unit of electricity, including smog-producing nitrogen, sulfur, and fine particles (PM2.5). This pollution falls disproportionately on communities of color or low income, so CCS is an environmental justice abuse. And every dollar spent on CCS is a dollar that cannot be spent on renewable energy.

There is no market for billions of tons of hazardous waste CO2. Cue Uncle Sam. The federal government has spent more than $9 billion taxpayer dollars since 2010 to help coal and oil companies get CCS off the ground.

To burnish the green credentials of CCS, two major projects are getting underway now in the Midwest, to capture CO2 from dozens of refineries that turn corn into ethanol alcohol, which gets mixed into gasoline.

The climate credentials of the corn-ethanol industry are shaky. In 2008, a Princeton University research group calculated that a gallon of corn-ethanol releases more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline because forests and grasslands are plowed to plant corn, releasing CO2 from soil. Since then, other studies have tried to refute those Princeton results by claiming land-use changes from corn-ethanol must be ignored because they are too hard to measure. It’s a crucial issue that remains contested.

Now a tremendous fight is brewing in the Midwest as two major CO2 pipeline projects seek permission to install over 3000 miles of pipe to carry a total of 27 million tons of liquid hazardous waste CO2 per year across privately-owned farmland, with many land owners saying “No.” There’s already talk of court battles to stop both projects.
» Read article

» More about CCS

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

» More about fossil fuels

LIQUEFIED NATURAL GAS

LNG Canada On Track to Become ‘Financial Albatross’, Analysts Warn
By The Energy Mix
November 25, 2021

British Columbia’s only confirmed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal may be on its way to becoming a “financial albatross”, according to a new analysis released Wednesday, even as a developer continues to tout a second LNG project in Howe Sound, just north of Vancouver.

The LNG Canada megaproject was approved with lavish provincial subsidies in 2018, producing a massive emissions gap in the province’s climate plan. Now under construction, it’s the intended terminus for the Coastal GasLink pipeline that has become a trigger for militarized raids on unceded Indigenous land and a railway blockade in the weeks leading up to COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.

Now, a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) says the first phase of LNG Canada “could be the last liquefied natural gas project built in British Columbia” given changing market conditions, project delays, rising costs, and policy shifts.

“Over the last three years, market shifts and policy changes have tested LNG Canada’s long-term economic viability,” said lead author Omar Mawji, IEEFA’s energy finance Canada analyst. “This project could become a financial albatross for its sponsor investors, and it stands as a warning to other natural gas producers” involved with natural gas fracking projects in the Montney Basin in northeastern B.C.

That isn’t a good look for Phase 2 of the LNG Canada venture, or for other LNG projects that B.C. Premier John Horgan and his Liberal Party predecessor, Christy Clark, have been desperately promoting for years.

“If the project sponsors assessed the energy landscape today instead of 2018, they would likely have been far more cautious in deciding whether to move forward with Phase 1,” Mawji said in an IEEFA release. “The conditions do not bode well for other LNG projects in Canada.”
» Read article

» More about LNG

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Weekly News Check-In 7/23/21

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Welcome back.

Our friends and neighbors are participating in a stand-out protest at the corner of Dalton and Thorndyke Ave in Pittsfield till 6pm today, bringing attention to the bad health and climate effects of peaking power plants – and the need to replace them with batteries. If you’re in the area, head over to join them, or offer a honk and supportive wave as you drive by! Meanwhile, we have breaking news about exciting developments in long-duration battery storage that carry the potential to make all fossil fuel power plants – not just peakers – obsolete within a few years. These developments highlight just how out-of-step Peabody’s proposed 55MW gas/oil peaker plant would be, even as its developer insists on moving forward.

Protests and actions are focused on big banks that finance fossil projects – raising the stakes ahead of this fall’s UN climate summit in Britain. Of course, oil and gas extraction is driven by global demand to either burn the stuff as fuel or process it into other products. A pair of articles explore how a greener economy will have to contend with the issues of consumerism and meat consumption.

This week’s climate reporting includes another stark warning from the International Energy Agency (IEA), noting that we’re failing to lower emissions at all. It spotlights the hypocrisy of wealthy governments’ “build back better” campaigns, which have so far devoted scant resources to clean energy. We also found an article explaining why Canada, a country that definitely knows better, continues to behave as if its fossil future extends forever.

Meanwhile, clean energy keeps getting cheaper, and policy negotiations around modernizing the grid are getting into the real nitty-gritty of figuring out how to allocate transmission reform costs among various stakeholders.

You’ve probably heard the Big Oil propaganda that electric vehicle emissions can be high if drivers recharge from a grid supplied by dirty fuels like coal and oil. An extensive global study resoundingly busted that myth. Turns out EVs are considerably cleaner than comparable gasoline or diesel vehicles no matter where they plug in. Even as global sales surge, General Motors seems determined to drive away its own EV customers. The company is botching its response to defects in the 2017-19 Chevy Bolt that resulted in numerous battery fires.

Carbon capture & sequestration (along with green hydrogen) are increasingly promoted as climate solutions by major fossil fuel players. By banging the drum for this unproven and expensive technology, they hope to convince policymakers that “business as usual” is on the cusp of magically going emissions free. Two articles describe this ongoing folly, and – yikes! – show how much influence it’s already exerting. We consider carbon capture to be a good thing, and support developing technologies that economically pull carbon dioxide from ambient air. It should never serve to enable or encourage continued combustion of fossil fuel.

We close with an update on a fossil fuel industry story we’ve followed for a long time – the unsustainable business model of fracking. While some shale gas production remains viable, it appears that shale oil projects are coming up dry in the hunt for investors.

For even more environmental news, info, and events, check out the latest newsletters from our colleagues at Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT) and Berkshire Zero Waste Initiative (BZWI)!

— The NFGiM Team

PEAKING POWER PLANTS

Some want to stop pollution from local power plants. How does that pollution impact health?
By Danny Jin, The Berkshire Eagle
July 17, 2021

PITTSFIELD — Air pollution might not come up often in conversations between medical doctors and patients. Yet, doctors say that pollutants, including those emitted by local “peaker” power plants, can play a role in worsening heart and lung health.

Exposure to pollutants is associated with greater rates of developing asthma and other ailments that reduce lung function. Small particles known as particulate matter are especially concerning, and those levels also are linked with heightened risk for suffering a heart attack.

“Science has shown that pollutants take years off our lives,” said Dr. David Oelberg, a lung specialist with Berkshire Health Systems. “A lot of this stuff is not something that a patient is going to feel hurts them on a day-to-day basis unless they can see smog in the air. … It’s a bit of a silent killer.”

Oelberg said he only recently has become aware of peaker plants, but he since has signed a petition circulated by the Berkshire Environmental Action Team asking the owners of three local peaker plants to consider switching to less-polluting energy sources. He named carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter as harmful pollutants.

BEAT and about 20 other groups are seeking to transition the three peakers to clean energy. The coalition has had what it says are collaborative discussions with the owner of two of those plants, and it now is focusing its efforts on Pittsfield Generating, a gas-fired plant on Merrill Road, near Allendale Elementary School and the Morningside neighborhood in Pittsfield.
» Read article

Peabody utility plans to shutdown older plant
By Erin Nolan, The Salem News
July 21, 2021

PEABODY — Plans to build a 55-megawatt natural gas-powered “peaker” plant along the Waters River are forging ahead, but the Peabody Municipal Light Plant officials recently announced their decision to decommission an existing 20-megawatt fossil fuel-burning plant at the same location.

According to PMLP Manager Charles Orphanos, the decision to retire the older, less efficient plant was made after hearing the concerns of ratepayers and analyzing new census data which shows an increase in the number of “environmental justice areas” surrounding the plant.

Plans to build a new peaker plant, which would only run during periods of especially high demand for electricity, have been in the works since 2015. The plant, referred to as Project 2015A in public documents, would be owned and operated by the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC) and was previously approved to be built at PMLP’s Waters River substation, behind the Pulaski Street Industrial Park.

On May 11, MMWEC announced they were pausing the $85 million Project 2015A in order to address the environmental and health concerns of residents, seek input from stakeholders and consider alternative energy options.

Sudi Smoller, a Peabody resident and a member of the community group Breathe Clean North Shore (BCNS), said while she and other members of the group are grateful for PMLP’s decision to decommission Gas Turbine Number One, she still has additional concerns.

“We still don’t trust MMWEC or PMLP,” she said, noting all the changes which have been made over the past several weeks. “That suggests to me that we need more time to continue making improvements.”

She also noted that the two plants are not the same size, and decommissioning one plant does not change the fact the PMLP and other municipal light plants are investing in a fossil fuel resource even as climate change concerns are growing.

Smoller also said she is unhappy that MMWEC has not committed to doing an environmental impact study or comprehensive health impact study.

Jerry Halberstadt, another Peabody resident and member of BCNS, said he is also still hoping for more comprehensive environmental and health reviews.

“PMLP has promised to decommission an old, expensive peaker plant, but that does not offset the long-term harm that the new 55MW peaker plant will do,” he said in a statement. “The old plant is long past retirement age; it is a good, but not a sufficient concession. If PMLP and MMWEC were sincere in their desire to respect the concerns of citizens, they would enter into meaningful negotiations.”
» Read article

» More about peakers

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

‘Deadline Glasgow’: As Climate Summit Looms, Campaign Targets Complicity of Banks and Biden
Scores of groups are “calling on all financial institutions and the U.S. government to end their support for companies engaged in climate destruction and human rights abuses.”
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
July 20, 2021

More than 160 organizations launched a new campaign Tuesday, ahead of a United Nations climate summit this fall, demanding that Wall Street and U.S. President Joe Biden cut off funding for companies and projects fueling the climate emergency.

The “Deadline Glasgow—Defund Climate Chaos” campaign is spearheaded by the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, which targets asset managers, banks, and insurers for their roles in climate destruction.

However, anyone who supports the campaign’s demands can sign a petition “calling on all financial institutions and the U.S. government to end their support for companies engaged in climate destruction and human rights abuses by the start of the Glasgow climate talks.”

The campaign includes an 8:00 pm ET kickoff event featuring Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.); 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben; and Giniw Collective founder Tara Houska, one of the Indigenous women leading the fight against the Line 3 tar sands pipeline.

The two-week U.N. summit known as COP 26, scheduled to start on October 31 in the Scottish city, will be “the most important climate talks since the Paris agreement,” the petition says. That deal, which outlines global goals for limiting temperature rise this century, was adopted at COP 21 in late 2015.

For this year’s summit, hosted by the United Kingdom in partnership with Italy, parties to the Paris agreement are being asked to present greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets for the next decade that align with reaching net zero by 2050.
» Read article
» Sign the petition

City, county leaders join calls to stop Enbridge pipeline projects in Minnesota, Wisconsin
By Chris Hubbuch, Wisconsin State Journal
July 20, 2021

Local leaders are drafting resolutions in support of people working to stop the expansion of Enbridge Energy pipelines that transport Canadian oil across Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The Madison City Council is expected to vote on a resolution Tuesday in support of Indigenous sovereignty and calling on local, state and federal leaders to stop the reroute of Line 5 in northern Wisconsin and construction of Enbridge’s $2.9 billion Line 3 replacement in Minnesota.

The resolution, which has 13 sponsors, notes that each of the lines crosses dozens of rivers, streams and wetlands, including the Mississippi River, and cites spills in 1991 and 2010 that leaked millions of gallons of oil into rivers.

Dane County Board member Heidi Wegleitner said she plans to introduce a similar resolution later this week.

Speaking at a send-off event Monday for several protestors heading to camps along the Line 3 pipeline route through northern Minnesota, Madison City Council President Syed Abbas said people in the United States are fortunate to have clean water.

“We are blessed and we have to say thanks to the Indigenous community for that,” Abbas said. “We need to stand with them. We might tomorrow get to a similar situation where we don’t have clean water because of contamination.”
» Read article

» More about protests and actions

GREENING THE ECONOMY

New Report Reveals Top Retail Shipping Polluters
By Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
July 20, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic has left U.S. customers ever more reliant on retail goods shipped around the world to their doorsteps, but what does all of this fossil-fuel-fueled transportation cost the environment?

In a new report released Tuesday, nonprofits Pacific Environment and Stand.earth have uncovered the 15 retail giants that contribute the most both to the climate crisis and air pollution by shipping goods to the U.S. from overseas.

“These findings reveal new environmental and public health impacts of retail companies’ manufacturing and transport choices — and they are damning,” the report authors wrote.

By shipping goods, these 15 companies emitted the same amount of greenhouse gases as 1.5 million U.S. homes in 2019 alone. The same year, they also released two-billion vehicles worth of sulfur oxide pollution, 65.7 million vehicles worth of particulate matter pollution and 27.4 million vehicles worth of nitrous oxide pollution.

Walmart topped the list in terms of overall shipping emissions, followed by other familiar names Ashley, Target, Dole, Home Depot, Chiquita, Ikea, Amazon, Samsung, Nike, LG, Redbull, Family Dollar, Williams-Sonoma and Lowes.

The report notes that high shipping emissions are built into the retail business model that has been in place for decades, in which manufacturing is outsourced to other countries and shipped to the U.S. using fossil fuels. As a result, the world’s shipping fleet has quadrupled since the 1980s. Shipping now releases one billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, causes 6.4 million childhood asthma cases and contributes to 260,000 early deaths every year.
» Read article
» Read the report

Investigation: How the Meat Industry is Climate-Washing its Polluting Business Model

Growing global meat consumption threatens to derail the Paris Agreement, but that hasn’t stopped the meat industry insisting it is part of the solution to climate change.
By Caroline Christen, DeSmog Blog
July 18, 2021

In February last year, the head of a leading global meat industry body gave a “pep talk” to his colleagues at an Australian agriculture conference.

“It’s a recurring theme that somehow the livestock sector and eating meat is detrimental to the environment, that it is a serious negative in terms of the climate change discussions,” Hsin Huang, Secretary General of the International Meat Secretariat (IMS), told his audience. But the sector, he insisted, could be the “heroes in this discussion” if it wanted to.

“We cannot continue business as we have done in the past,” he went on. “If we are not proactive in helping to convince the public and policymakers in particular, who have an impact on our activities – if we are not successful in convincing them of the benefits that we bring to the table, then we will be relegated to has-beens.”

Huang’s speech points to an industry nervous about its role in a carbon-constrained future. In the face of mounting evidence of the livestock industry’s climate impacts and a growing array of meat alternatives, the sector has developed a multi-pronged PR strategy that seeks to legitimise not only the industry’s current activities but also its plans to scale up production — despite clear warnings from scientists that this could scupper efforts to meet climate targets.
» Read article

» More about greening the economy

CLIMATE

IEA Warns CO2 Emissions Set to Climb to ‘All-Time High’ as Rich Nations Skimp on Clean Energy
The Paris-based agency slammed rich governments for promising to “build back better” but refusing to “put their money where their mouth is.”
By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
July 20, 2021

The International Energy Agency warned Tuesday that global carbon dioxide emissions are on track to soar to record levels in 2023—and continue rising thereafter—as governments fail to make adequate investments in green energy and end their dedication to planet-warming fossil fuels.

In a new report, IEA estimates that of the $16 trillion world governments have spent to prop up their economies during the coronavirus crisis, just 2% of that total has gone toward clean energy development.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, slammed what he characterized as the hypocrisy of rich governments that promised a green recovery from the pandemic but have thus far refused “to put their money where their mouth is.” Research published last month revealed that between January 2020 and March 2021, the governments of wealthy G7 nations poured tens of billions of dollars more into fossil fuels than renewable energy.

On top of being “far from what’s needed to put the world on a path to reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century,” Birol said that the money allocated to green energy measures thus far is “not even enough to prevent global emissions from surging to a new record.”

“Governments need to increase spending and policy action rapidly to meet the commitments they made in Paris in 2015—including the vital provision of financing by advanced economies to the developed world,” Birol continued. “But they must then go even further by leading clean energy investment and deployment to much greater heights beyond the recovery period in order to shift the world onto a pathway to net-zero emissions by 2050, which is narrow but still achievable—if we act now.”
» Read article
» Read the IEA report

EXCLUSIVE: Experts Press Trudeau to Link Regulator’s Energy Planning to 1.5°C Targets
By Mitchell Beer, The Energy Mix
July 20, 2021

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to bring the Canada Energy Regulator (CER)’s energy futures modelling in line with the Paris climate agreement, The Energy Mix has learned, just as an international agency warns that the world’s 1.5°C climate stabilization target is slipping out of reach.

The CER’s annual Energy Futures report is a critically important tool in national energy policy, used by investors and businesses to project future supply, demand, and pricing for fossil fuels. Invariably, it projects continuing growth in fossil fuel production, despite the government’s promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 45% this decade and bring the country to net-zero by 2050.

Now, in a July 8 letter obtained by The Mix, nearly two dozen climate scientists, academics, and energy system modellers are urging Trudeau to instruct the CER to model an energy future that supports the “monumental task” of bringing global greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050.

So far, the regulator “has only modelled a suite of scenarios that imply the Paris Agreement’s goals will not be met, where the world does too little to reduce its production and consumption of oil, gas, and coal, and where Canada’s climate policies lack ambition and fail to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050,” the letter states.

While the CER “presents itself as the authoritative source of [Canadian] energy information”, the regulator “does not currently model scenarios where Canada’s energy sector aligns with the government’s net-zero by 2050 goal,” the letter adds. As a signatory to the Paris Agreement and a member country to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “Canada should bring its energy futures modelling into alignment with international best practice and the government’s net-zero goal.”

To make that happen, Trudeau must direct the CER to model energy futures that are “informed” by the IEA’s recent Net Zero by 2050 report, which called for an immediate end to new fossil fuel projects, the 21 signatories say. The projections in the IEA’s May 18 release were stark: the Paris-based agency foresaw global oil demand falling 75%, to 24 million barrels per day, between 2020 and 2050, gas demand dropping 55%, and remaining oil production “increasingly concentrated in a small number of low-cost producers.”

The takeaway quote from the IEA’s work: “Beyond projects already committed as of 2021, there are no new oil and gas fields approved for development in our pathway, and no new coal mines or mine extensions are required.”
» Blog editor’s note: this article illuminates the maddening disconnect between the Canadian government’s acceptance of climate science, and its refusal to formulate policies that phase out its production of fossil fuels.
» Read article

» More about climate

CLEAN ENERGY

Investors pivoting to renewables as cost of energy drops and climate targets loom
By Sean Rai-Roche, PV Tech
July 19, 2021

Investors are turning away from fossil fuels and shifting into renewables because of falling costs and climate targets, with US banks lagging behind their European and Asian counterparts.

This was the message from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis’s (IEEFA) report Global Investors Move into Renewable Infrastructure, which was based on data from BloombergNEF.

It put the increasing investment down to “the inherent advantages of investment in clean energy”, such as higher risk adjusted returns and stable cashflows, along with the COVID-19 recovery packages of some governments incentivising green investment.

The report showed how in the financial year 2020, the clean energy sector received record investment, with US$501 billion committed – an increase of 9% of the previous year. Of this, the renewable energy sector received US$303 billion (60%) of total investment.

Total renewable energy installations hit 260GW last year despite COVID-19 pressures, which is 50% more than 2019. In contrast, total fossil fuel capacity dropped to 60GW in 2020 from 64GW in 2019.

A key factor here is the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for renewables versus fossil fuels. Solar PV’s LCOE has fallen 90% since 2009, according to the report, while those of coal, nuclear and gas have either increased, remained flat or dropped only slightly.
» Read article

» More about clean energy

MODERNIZING THE GRID

Cost allocation remains key challenge for FERC ahead of transmission reform, Glick says
By Catherine Morehouse, Utility Dive
July 20, 2021

As federal regulators begin the long process of tackling transmission reform, one of several outstanding challenges will be how to allocate costs, according to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Richard Glick.

Transmission reform is considered a key policy development needed to unleash gigawatts of renewables onto the U.S. power grid, experts agree. FERC last week took an initial step toward revisiting its policies, which were last updated in 2011, by opening a comment period on an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANOPR). The commission will likely host technical conferences this fall as part of its effort to build a record before it issues a NOPR.

Glick ultimately wants to see an outcome that better prepares for future resource buildouts, expedites the interconnection process and improves cost allocation to better assess relative benefits. Cost allocation is poised to be one of the commission’s biggest challenges, but Glick said FERC’s recent joint task force with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners will help determine what allocation is appropriate.

“We know that the states play a huge role in … how transmission costs are allocated,” he said. “And because I think to the extent you can’t figure out where the costs are allocated, it’s very difficult to build the transmission facility in the first place.”

Current policy generally puts the majority of system costs for new transmission facilities onto power providers, which can cause renewables generators to back out of the interconnection queue altogether. Those withdrawals cause further delays to the already-clogged queues, according to a March report from Concentric Energy Advisors prepared for renewables industry groups. For example, a Tenaska complaint in front of FERC alleges that the Southwest Power Pool overcharged it millions of dollars in upgrade costs, which it says are not needed for its project, and would benefit other projects in the queue.
» Read article

» More about modernizing the grid

ENERGY STORAGE

Startup Claims Breakthrough in Long-Duration Batteries
Form Energy’s iron-air batteries could have big ramifications for storing electricity on the power grid
By Russell Gold, Wall Street Journal
Photos by Philip Keith, WSJ
July 22, 2021

A four-year-old startup says it has built an inexpensive battery that can discharge power for days using one of the most common elements on Earth: iron.

Form Energy Inc.’s batteries are far too heavy for electric cars. But it says they will be capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.

The work of the Somerville, Mass., company has long been shrouded in secrecy and nondisclosure agreements. It recently shared its progress with The Wall Street Journal, saying it wants to make regulators and utilities aware that if all continues to go according to plan, its iron-air batteries will be capable of affordable, long-duration power storage by 2025.

Its backers include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate investment fund whose investors include Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. Form recently initiated a $200 million funding round, led by a strategic investment from steelmaking giant ArcelorMittal SA, MT 0.95% one of the world’s leading iron-ore producers.

Form is preparing to soon be in production of the “kind of battery you need to fully retire thermal assets like coal and natural gas” power plants, said the company’s chief executive, Mateo Jaramillo, who developed Tesla Inc.’s Powerwall battery and worked on some of its earliest automotive powertrains. [emphasis added]

On a recent tour of Form’s windowless laboratory, Mr. Jaramillo gestured to barrels filled with low-cost iron pellets as its key advantage in the rapidly evolving battery space. Its prototype battery, nicknamed Big Jim, is filled with 18,000 pebble-size gray pieces of iron, an abundant, nontoxic and nonflammable mineral.

For a lithium-ion battery cell, the workhorse of electric vehicles and today’s grid-scale batteries, the nickel, cobalt, lithium and manganese minerals used currently cost between $50 and $80 per kilowatt-hour of storage, according to analysts.

Using iron, Form believes it will spend less than $6 per kilowatt-hour of storage on materials for each cell. Packaging the cells together into a full battery system will raise the price to less than $20 per kilowatt-hour, a level at which academics have said renewables plus storage could fully replace traditional fossil-fuel-burning power plants.

A battery capable of cheaply discharging power for days has been a holy grail in the energy industry, due to the problem that it solves and the potential market it creates.

Form Energy’s iron-air battery breathes in oxygen and converts iron to rust, then turns the rust back into iron and breathes out oxygen, discharging and charging the battery in the process.

Earlier this year, it built Big Jim, a full-scale one-meter-by-one-meter battery cell. If it works as expected, 20 of these cells will be grouped in a battery. Thousands of these batteries will be strung together, filling entire warehouses and storing weeks’ worth of electricity. It could take days to fully charge these battery systems, but the batteries can discharge electricity for 150 hours at a stretch.
» Read article

» More about energy storage

CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

One of the biggest myths about EVs is busted in new study
Even EVs that plug into dirty grids emit fewer greenhouse gases than gas-powered cars
By Justine Calma, The Verge
July 21, 2021

A new study lays to rest the tired argument that electric vehicles aren’t much cleaner than internal combustion vehicles. Over the life cycle of an EV — from digging up the materials needed to build it to eventually laying the car to rest — it will release fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a gas-powered car, the research found. That holds true globally, whether an EV plugs into a grid in Europe with a larger share of renewables, or a grid in India that still relies heavily on coal.

This shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Fossil fuels are driving the climate crisis. So governments from California to the European Union have proposed phasing out internal combustion engines by 2035. But there are still people who claim that EVs are only as clean as the grids they run on — and right now, fossil fuels still dominate when it comes to the energy mix in most places.

“We have a lot of lobby work from parts of the automotive industry saying that electric vehicles are not that much better if you take into account the electricity production and the battery production. We wanted to look into this and see whether these arguments are true,” says Georg Bieker, a researcher at the nonprofit research group the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) that published the report. The ICCT’s analysis found that those arguments don’t hold true over time.

The report estimates the emissions from medium-sized EVs registered in 2021 in either India, China, the US, or Europe — countries that make up 70 percent of new car sales globally and are representative of other markets across the world, the ICCT says. Lifetime emissions for an EV in Europe are between 66 and 69 percent lower compared to that of a gas-guzzling vehicle, the analysis found. In the US, an EV produces between 60 to 68 percent fewer emissions. In China, which uses more coal, an EV results in between 37 to 45 percent fewer emissions. In India, it’s between 19 to 34 percent lower.
» Read article
» Read the ICCT report

GM leaves owner owing $12K after Bolt EV battery fire last year
By Sean Graham, Electrek
July 20, 2021

GM again exploded into the mainstream news last week with an announcement that it was no longer safe to charge the Chevy Bolt EV unattended and that owners should park outside and away from structures out of fire concerns. This all started with a recall of 68,000 Bolt EVs in November of last year. While Hyundai had a similar problem and eventually elected to replace all Kona EV batteries with newer ones, GM decided that software could fix their problems. There have been at least two Bolt EV fires that had the final software update installed, which prompted GM’s recent announcement.

We reached out to a GM spokesperson for comment. We were told that GM is diligently investigating these latest fires and is working on a potential update to owners as quickly as possible. But the spokesperson could not give a timeframe for how this would progress.

While some are quick to dismiss electric vehicle fires as still less common than gas car fires, the opposite is actually true in this particular case. The Chevy Bolt, at least the 2019 model year, is more than an order of magnitude more likely to catch fire than a 2019 gas car, and it can do so in the middle of the night when you’re sleeping.

Electrek exclusively sat down with several owners of Bolt EV fires, and here’s one of their stories.

This is the owner’s recount from his Bolt EV fire that occurred on June 29, 2020, that GM confirmed to be battery-related.
» Read article

Eviation’s Hotly Anticipated Electric Commuter Plane Will Make Its Maiden Voyage This Year
The Washington-based startup expects its plane to be ready for operation in 2024.
By Bryan Hood, Robb Report
July 19, 2021

Three years after it was announced, Eviation Aircraft’s first electric plane is almost ready to take flight.

The Washington-based startup says its debut aircraft, the Alice, could make its maiden flight before the year is out. In fact, the company is so confident in the battery-powered commuter jet that it expects it to be in operation by 2024.

The just-unveiled production version of the Alice looks quite a bit different from the plane Eviation first showed off back in 2018. The zero-emission prototype had a very clear science fiction-inspired look, but the final version will sport a more refined and traditional fixed-wing design. That’s not the only change, either. The Alice now has just two propellers, both mounted on the tail, as opposed to the three its prototype was outfitted with, which were located at the rear and at the end of each wing.

Despite these changes, the Alice will still have room for nine passengers, not including the two seats in the cockpit for the pilot and co-pilot. That will put the plane firmly in the commuter and business class when it’s finally ready for operation. Each propeller is powered by a magni650 electric motor by magniX, according to a press release. It will also feature a fly-by-wire system from Honeywell, which will afford the pilot improved controls.

Eviation says the Alice will have a top speed of 253 miles per hour and a range of 440 nautical miles, which works out to about 506 miles. That means the plane should be able to easily make the trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco on a single charge. Anyone paying attention to electric vehicle announcements is probably used to outlandish power and range claims, but Alice’s numbers should actually be attainable. That’s because its high-density battery system uses currently available cells.
» Read article

» More about clean transportation

CARBON CAPTURE & SEQUESTRATION

Will the Democrats’ Climate Legislation Hinge on Carbon Capture?
The bipartisan infrastructure bill may include billions in support for the technology. Progressive groups are not happy about it.
By Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News
July 20, 2021

The Democrats’ fragile package of sweeping climate and infrastructure legislation might end up being held together by a technology known as carbon capture and storage. That is, if it doesn’t pull it apart.

The Senate is expected to vote Wednesday on a bipartisan infrastructure bill that includes billions in government support for carbon capture, which pulls carbon dioxide out of smokestack emissions or straight from the air and pumps it underground. But on Monday, a coalition of hundreds of progressive environmental groups sent an open letter to President Joe Biden and Democratic Congressional leaders calling on them to reject the technology.

“Carbon capture is not a climate solution,” the groups wrote in the letter, which was accompanied by an advertisement in the Washington Post. “To the contrary, investing in carbon capture delays the needed transition away from fossil fuels and other combustible energy sources, and poses significant new environmental, health, and safety risks, particularly to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities already overburdened by industrial pollution, dispossession, and the impacts of climate change.”

The letter reflects a split that has emerged in the advocacy community and among Democrats. Many of the nation’s most influential, mainstream environmental groups did not sign the letter, while those organizations that did sign included more left-leaning, justice-focused and local groups.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, has taken on an increasingly central role in climate policy discussions over the last couple of years. It is one of the few climate actions that draws bipartisan support. Most major labor unions also support CCS, arguing that its deployment could provide new jobs and help extend the life of some gas or coal-burning power plants, which often provide high-paying union jobs. And the fossil fuel industries have promoted the technology for decades.
» Read article
» Read the letter

DOE Quietly Backs Plan for Carbon Capture Network Larger Than Entire Oil Pipeline System
Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and major labor group AFL-CIO are behind the “blueprint” for a multi-billion dollar system to transport captured CO2 — and offer a lifeline to fossil fuel plants.
By Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog
July 18, 2021

An organization run by former Obama-era Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, with the backing of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 56 labor unions, has created a policy “blueprint” to build a nationwide pipeline network capable of carrying a gigaton of captured carbon dioxide (CO2).

The “Building to Net-Zero” blueprint appears to be quietly gaining momentum within the Energy Department, where a top official has discussed ways to put elements into action using the agency’s existing powers.

The pipeline network would be twice the size of the current U.S. oil pipeline network by volume, according to the blueprint, released by a recently formed group calling itself the Labor Energy Partnership. Backers say the proposed pipeline network — including CO2 “hubs” in the Gulf Coast, the Ohio River Valley, and Wyoming — would help reduce climate-changing pollution by transporting captured carbon dioxide to either the oil industry, which would undo some of the climate benefits by using the CO2 to revive aging oilfields, or to as-yet unbuilt facilities for underground storage.

The blueprint, however, leaves open many questions about how the carbon would be captured at the source — a process that so far has proved difficult and expensive — and where it would be sent, focusing instead on suggesting policies the federal government can adopt to boost CO2 pipeline construction.

Climate advocates fear that building such a large CO2 pipeline network could backfire, causing more greenhouse gas pollution by enabling aging coal-fired power plants to remain in service longer, produce pipes that could wind up carrying fossil fuels if carbon capture efforts fall through, and represent an expensive waste of federal funds intended to encourage a meaningful energy transition.

In March, over 300 climate and environmental justice advocacy groups sent a letter to Congress, arguing that subsidizing carbon capture “could entrench the fossil economy for decades to come.”
» Read article
» Read the letter

» More about CCS

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

The U.S. Shale Revolution Has Surrendered to Reality
Fracking companies aren’t drilling as investment continues to dry up.
By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog
July 16, 2021

“Drill, baby, drill is gone forever.”

That was the recent assessment of Saudi Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman of the American oil industry’s future potential. As Saudi Arabia’s energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz is one of the most influential voices in the global oil markets. Fortune termed it a “bold taunt,” and a warning to U.S. frackers to not increase oil production.

The response by the U.S. producers — to shut up and take it — quietly confirms this reality. Shale oil’s era of growth appears to be over. The reason is that even as global oil demand and prices rise, the economics of the shale oil business model continue to not work. The U.S. shale industry has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in the past decade producing oil and selling it for less than it cost to produce.

This was possible because despite the losses, investors kept giving the industry money. But now investors appear to have grown tired of losing money on U.S. shale companies and new lending to the industry has dropped dramatically.

As reported this month by The Wall Street Journal, “capital markets showed little interest in funding expansive new drilling campaigns” for the U.S. shale industry. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, a partner at investment firm OnyxPoint Global Management LP, told The Journal that the problem facing fracking companies is that “they can’t access cheap capital any longer.”

Without new infusions of money, the industry can’t drill for more oil, and that is why the Saudis feel confident taunting the U.S. oil industry. Prince Abdulaziz’s confidence is based in the financial realities of U.S. shale.
» Read article

» More about fossil fuel

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Weekly News Check-In 7/9/21

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Welcome back.

We’ll open today with big thanks to everyone who stood out with us last Friday – and to those braving today’s soggy weather – holding signs to raise public awareness of pollution issues related to Pittsfield’s largest peaking power plant. We’re thrilled to report that Pittsfield’s Board of Health voted unanimously to write to the plant’s owner, Hull Street Energy, and request that officials explore a transition to green energy to alleviate its contribution to global warming and to lessen local health consequences.

Elsewhere, protests and actions by local activists resulted in cancellation of the Byhalia Pipeline project which appeared to have been deliberately routed through environmental justice communities in southwest Memphis. While that victory points to the possibility of a better future, a split decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve the Gulf Run pipeline points to a regulator still struggling to extract itself from the tar pit of the past.

Maine caught our attention when pro-environment Governor Janet Mills signed into law a bill prohibiting offshore wind farms in state waters. But on closer reading, it appears to make sense. The legislation protects the near-shore region, keeps the lobster industry happy, and encourages wind development in federal waters – generally more than three miles offshore.

The proposed Climate Conservation Corps got a boost this week when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made clear that he would prioritize its inclusion in federal infrastructure legislation currently taking shape. Inspired by Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, the new CCC would provide a national service platform where young people can apply their energies to solve environmental and climate challenges, and prepare themselves for good jobs in the emerging green economy.

The Guardian published an excellent long article exploring some of the earliest government policy responses to emerging awareness of human-caused climate change. The historical perspective is sobering, and we followed it provocatively with a rather speculative article describing potential future problems related to the alarming buildup of plastic waste in the environment. We’re being warned again – will we act this time or follow the same path of deflection, denial, and delay?

We’re calling out Grasshopper Energy for its unacceptable disregard for indigenous artifacts located on a site it’s developing for a 2.4MW solar farm in eastern MA. Destruction of ceremonial stone landscapes is the same assault, whether it’s done for gas pipelines or clean energy.

New York based BlocPower is in the news again, having secured funding to expand its energy efficiency retrofit model to even more buildings in typically under-served communities. Transportation could also get an efficiency boost as the Biden administration aims to establish a set of milestones that encourage rapid electrification of that sector.

A new report sheds light on fossil fuel industry pollution of the Gulf of Mexico during ten years of offshore fracking. And just like last week, we close with a report that suggests further likelihood that the Goldboro LNG export facility will never be built in Nova Scotia.

For even more environmental news, info, and events, check out the latest newsletters from our colleagues at Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT) and Berkshire Zero Waste Initiative (BZWI)!

— The NFGiM Team

PEAKING POWER PLANTS

‘Peaker’ power plant owner should discuss cleaner operation, Pittsfield health officials say
By Larry Parnass, The Berkshire Eagle
July 8, 2021

PITTSFIELD — A grassroots fight to curb a Pittsfield power plant’s environmental damage just won a new public ally.

Health officials in Pittsfield will appeal to the company that owns Pittsfield Generating on Merrill Road to discuss ways to shift from use of fossil fuels to lighten the plant’s carbon footprint and environmental harm.

“It’s consistent with our mission,” Brad Gordon, a member of the Board of Health, told his colleagues Wednesday.

The four-member board voted unanimously to write to the plant’s owner, Hull Street Energy, and request that officials explore a transition to green energy to alleviate its contribution to global warming and to lessen local health consequences.

That letter will go out in the days ahead, as Hull Street Energy continues to pursue a new permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection.

“I would think that we’d want to get that process moving,” said board member Steve Smith.

The move widens public calls for action. On June 30, the leader of the Tri-Town Health Department, which covers Lee, Lenox and Stockbridge, urged Hull Street Energy to clean up its act.

“Given the feasible alternative of solar energy with battery storage, the Tri-Town Health District, and its board of health members hereby strongly encourages that these outdated facilities transition to green energy to comply with reductions in emissions,” wrote James J. Wilusz.
» Read article
» Check out the Put Peakers in the Past campaign

Berkshire Environmental Group Pushing To “Put Peakers In The Past”
By Josh Landes, WAMC
July 7, 2021

Tonight, the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Board of Health will hear a petition calling for three Berkshire County power plants to transition to green energy. The Berkshire Environmental Action Team’s No Fracked Gas in Mass initiative is behind the effort. The group says it would reduce the environmental and health impacts from the “peaker” plants that come online during spikes in energy use by customers. They’ve also organized an ongoing Friday afternoon demonstration series against the plants on Dalton Avenue in Pittsfield by one of the peakers located on Merrill Road. WAMC spoke with No Fracked Gas in Mass program director Rose Wessell about the initiative.

WESSEL: No Fracked Gas in Mass started in response to the large pipeline projects that were being proposed in 2014. We initially responded to the NED pipeline, the Northeast Energy Direct, that was proposed by Kinder Morgan, and soon found that there were five large pipelines being proposed across the state at that time. Since then, that project has been withdrawn, one of the other big pipelines was withdrawn. We’ve been making sure to keep on top of new fracked gas infrastructure that was being proposed and present arguments as to why it shouldn’t be built. And now with our “Put Peakers In The Past” campaign, we’re starting to take on existing fossil fuel infrastructure that we feel has had its time and doesn’t need to be what it is anymore.
» Read article or listen to the interview

» More about peakers

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

‘A victory for us’: Southwest Memphis residents elated as developers drop Byhalia Pipeline project
Landowners who received money from planners can keep it, eminent domain cases will be withdrawn, stakeholders told
By Carrington J. Tatum and Hannah Grabenstein, MLK50
July 2, 2021

At first, it was just a few Black residents – most elderly – in one of Memphis’ poorer neighborhoods, up against a behemoth pipeline company.

Then some younger activists showed up. They organized rallies, wrangled support from elected officials, filed and fought lawsuits. National media and celebrities took notice.

And then late Friday afternoon came the news: Developers of the Byhalia Connection Pipeline – what proponents insisted would create hundreds of jobs and what opponents called the embodiment of environmental racism and a threat to the water supply – would no longer pursue the project.

The explanation given was “lower US oil production resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,” but at least one environmental activist gave the credit to pipeline opponents, including the grassroots Memphis Community Against the Pipeline organization.

At a hastily called gathering Friday evening at Alonzo Weaver Park in Southwest Memphis — where MCAP held most of its rallies — MCAP founder Justin J. Pearson stood with his hands stretched to the sky, thanking God.

“This is where what we view as power, met people-power, in a community they thought was powerless,” Pearson said. “It’s time to make sure we’ll never have to fight this fight again. And when we pass those laws, it will be an even bigger celebration.”
» Read article

Lawmaker Threatens to Subpoena Exxon After Secret Video
The chairman of a powerful House subcommittee said he is seeking answers from Exxon and other oil and gas giants over their role in spreading disinformation on climate change.
By Hiroko Tabuchi and Lisa Friedman, New York Times
July 2, 2021

The chairman of a House subcommittee is demanding that executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell, Chevron and other major oil and gas companies testify before Congress about the industry’s decades-long effort to wage disinformation campaigns around climate change.

Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said Friday he was prepared to use subpoena power to compel the companies to appear before lawmakers if they don’t do so voluntarily.

The move comes a day after a secretive video recording was made public in which a senior Exxon lobbyist said the energy giant had fought climate science through “shadow groups” and had targeted influential senators in an effort to weaken President Biden’s climate agenda. Several of those senators said this week that the lobbyist exaggerated their relationship or that they had no dealings with him.

“The video was appalling,” Mr. Khanna said in an interview on Friday. He called it the latest evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to “engage in climate denialism and to manipulate public opinion and to exert undue influence in shaping policy in Congress.”

Mr. Khanna said the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on the Environment, which he chairs, will issue letters next week to top executives at Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and other oil and gas companies and trade groups demanding documents and testimony. One major target of the panel’s inquiry are dark money groups that have been funded by fossil fuel companies to disseminate falsehoods about climate science and policy solutions. The hearing is expected to be held in the fall.
» Read article

» More about protests and actions

FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

Energy Transfer’s Gulf Run Pipeline to Export Fracked Gas from Louisiana set to Begin Construction
But FERC’s business-as-usual approach to fossil fuel projects during the climate crisis looks increasingly shaky, casting new doubt on the industry’s prospects.
By Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog
July 1, 2021

In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) narrowly approved the construction of a new 42” diameter gas pipeline that will connect shale wells in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Ohio to a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal on the Gulf Coast, carrying over a billion cubic feet of fracked gas to be transported overseas every day.

The FERC decision was split, with two of the five commissioners dissenting, writing that the Commission had failed to adequately examine the climate-changing pollution linked to the fossil fuel pipeline.

That dissent in Gulf Run takes on new relevance as the term of FERC Commissioner Neil Chatterjee, appointed by Donald Trump in 2017, ended on Wednesday. President Joe Biden is expected to soon announce a nominee as Chatterjee’s replacement — a decision rumored to be between Willie Phillips, who, according to Politico Morning Energy, previously worked for Jeff Sessions and interned in George W. Bush’s Office of General Counsel, and Maria Duaime Robinson, a former official with Advanced Energy Economy, which advocates for solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear energy.

The Gulf Run pipeline, one small piece of the shale industry’s strategy to revive itself despite the growing climate crisis, offers a view of the crossroads faced by the Biden administration.

The project highlights federal regulators’ continued business-as-usual approach to fossil fuel infrastructure projects with decades-long expected lifespans and regulators’ failures to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
» Read article

» More about FERC

LEGISLATION

New Maine law prohibits offshore wind farms in state waters
But the compromise still encourages the development of offshore wind technology in federal waters off Maine.
By Kevin Miller, Portland Press Herald, in centralmaine.com
Photo: Maine Coast | Expedia
July 7, 2021

Gov. Janet Mills has signed into law a bill prohibiting offshore wind farms in state waters, in a compromise aimed at siting such projects farther from Maine’s heavily used inshore waters.

Mills is a vocal supporter of wind energy who has made addressing climate change a top priority of her administration. But segments of Maine’s fishing industry – particularly lobstermen – have been battling to ban any wind development off the coast of Maine over concerns about potential loss of access to valuable fishing grounds and other conflicts.

The bill proposed by Mills and signed into law this week would prohibit state and local governments from licensing or permitting the siting, construction or operation of wind turbines in the state territorial waters that extend three miles from shore. A demonstration project under development off Monhegan Island and future “pilot-scale, limited duration” research projects would be exempt from the prohibition.

The bill, L.D. 1619, also would create an Offshore Wind Research Consortium with an advisory board that includes representatives of the lobster industry, other commercial fishermen and the recreational charter fishing industry as well as energy experts. The board will advise the state on local and regional impacts from offshore wind power projects as gleaned from a state-backed “research array” of up to 12 turbines to be located in federal waters.
» Read article

» More about legislation

GREENING THE ECONOMY

‘This Is Huge’: Schumer Commits to Creating Civilian Climate Corps
“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to confront the climate crisis and create millions of middle-class union jobs,” he said. “Creating a new Civilian Climate Corps is a key step.”
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
July 8, 2021

After being targeted by progressive climate campaigners, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made clear on Wednesday that he will work to include the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps in evolving federal infrastructure legislation.

Schumer (D-N.Y.) issued a lengthy statement outlining his support for the inclusion of a Civilian Climate Corps (CCC), which was inspired by a New Deal-era program and formally unveiled as legislation earlier this year by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on the same day they reintroduced the Green New Deal Resolution.

The Sunrise Movement, whose New York City chapter took to the streets to push Schumer on the CCC proposal, celebrated his statement as a victory for local organizers and the youth-led movement more broadly.

“In the upcoming American Jobs and Families Plans legislation, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to confront the climate crisis and create millions of middle-class, family-sustaining union jobs,” Schumer said. “Creating a new Civilian Climate Corps is a key step towards both goals.”
» Read article

» More about greening the economy

CLIMATE

Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored)
The effects of ‘weird weather’ were already being felt in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were dismissed as prophets of doom
By Alice Bell, The Guardian
Photo: Homes destroyed by a storm in New York state in 1962. Photograph: Bettmann/Getty/Guardian Design
July 5, 2021
» Read article

An Indigenous Group’s Objection to Geoengineering Spurs a Debate About Social Justice in Climate Science
The Sámi people of Northern Sweden say blocking out the sun with reflective particles to cool the earth is the kind of thinking that produced the climate crisis in the first place.
By Haley Dunleavy, Inside Climate News
July 7, 2021

It was February in northern Sweden and the sun was returning after a dark winter. In the coming months the tundra would reawaken with lichens and shrubs for reindeer to forage in the permafrost encrusted Scandinavian mountain range. But the changing season also brought some unwelcome news to the Indigenous Sámi people, who live across northern Scandinavia, Finland and eastern Russia.

The members of the Saami Council were informed that researchers at Harvard planned to test a developing technology for climate mitigation, known as solar geoengineering, in Sápmi, their homeland. “When we learned what the idea of solar geoengineering is, we reacted quite instinctively,” said Åsa Larsson Blind, the Saami Council vice president, at a virtual panel about the risks of solar geoengineering, organized by the Center for International Environmental Law and other groups.

“This goes against our worldview that we as humans should live and adapt to nature,” she said.

The planned geoengineering project sought to limit global warming by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, reducing the amount of sunlight that beams down to Earth’s surface. The test, originally scheduled for June, would have been the first step in a series of small-scale experiments aimed at understanding the feasibility of combating global warming.
» Read article

» More about climate

CLEAN ENERGY

Wilson Street solar project ordered to pause after tribal officials claim disregard for Indigenous artifacts
By Mary Ellen Gambon, Hopkinton Independent
July 7, 2021

Two cease and desist orders were filed last week against Grasshopper Energy to stop construction of a 2.4-megawatt solar farm between Wilson Street and Cedar Street after allegations were made by the Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office that artifacts sacred to the tribe’s culture were destroyed.

“The Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office had done an investigation of the site and found some items of historical significance that they felt it was important to preserve on the ceremonial hill,” explained John Gelcich, the town’s principal planner. “There is a condition in the special permit that says that, if they find any new resources that they bring it before the Planning Board.”

He confirmed that two separate cease and desist orders were issued, the first by the tribal office and the second by the town, to stop work in the area of the ceremonial hill, which sits on the western portion of the site.

“My understanding of the town’s cease and desist order is just to bring the historical resources to their attention and to do what needs to be done to protect those resources,” Gelcich explained. “This will bring all parties to the table to discuss that.”

Narragansett tribal historic preservation officer John Brown was more direct in his criticism of the company. He said items of cultural significance were destroyed, including some large stone formations. Brown said the stones would have been used “several hundreds of years ago to [thousands] of years ago” as table-like structures on which ritual ceremonies were performed.

“We sent a cease and desist order because [Grasshopper] did not comply with the special permit issued by the town,” said Brown, whose organization is based in Charlestown, Rhode Island. “Several areas of the stone wall have been pulverized.”
» Blog editor’s note: Some of our readers may recall the 2017 battle over ceremonial stone landscapes and the CT Expansion pipeline. It’s no better when solar companies show disregard.
» Read article

More than 75 companies ask Congress to pass clean electricity standard
By Zack Budryk, The Hill
July 7, 2021

More than 75 major U.S. companies including Apple, Google, Lyft and Salesforce signed a letter circulated Wednesday urging Congress to adopt a federal clean electricity standard.

In the letter, signers urged the federal government adopt a standard that achieves 80 percent carbon neutrality by the end of the decade, with a goal of completely emission-free power by 2035.

Signers of the letter, organized by sustainability advocacy group Ceres and the Environmental Defense Fund, also include automakers General Motors and Tesla.

The letter notes that the electrical power sector alone generates a full third of nationwide carbon dioxide emissions created by burning fossil fuels. It is also the source of about 50 percent of natural gas use nationwide, which is itself a major driver of methane upstream leaks.

Scientists have estimated human-produced methane accounts for at least 25 percent of current warming.

“In addition to reducing emissions from the power sector, a clean electric power grid is also essential to unlock opportunities to reduce emissions in other sectors. Electrification of the transportation, buildings, and industrial sectors is a critical pathway for the U.S. to achieve a net zero-emissions future. Together, clean electricity and electrification could cut carbon pollution economy-wide by up to 75%,” the letter states.

“By acting now to enact a federal clean electricity standard, Congress and the President can spur a robust economic recovery, create millions of good-paying jobs, and build the infrastructure necessary for a strong, more equitable, and more inclusive American economy for the next century,” it adds.

White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy said in June a clean energy standard was one of the climate provisions the White House considers “non-negotiable” in a reconciliation infrastructure package.
» Read article

» More about clean energy

ENERGY EFFICIENCY

Continue reading →

Weekly News Check-In 7/2/21

1 Reply

Welcome back.

Peaking power plants were a hot topic this week, with efforts underway far and wide to replace these heavy polluters with green technologies like battery storage. We lead off with ace reporter Danny Jin’s excellent Berkshire Eagle article about campaigns close to home. Also a citizen’s letter clearly lays out the issues surrounding Peabody’s proposed gas plant, and a success story: how a battery project replaced a planned gas peaker in Oxnard, CA.

Activists occupied the Waltham, MA office of Canadian energy giant Enbridge, calling for cancellation of the Weymouth compressor station and Line 3 pipeline currently under construction across northern Minnesota. Meanwhile, an unprecedented number of legal actions against the oil and gas industry are proceeding through the courts. And on the legislative front, Congress voted to repeal Trump’s free pass on the powerful greenhouse gas methane, resetting emissions limits to levels previously established by the Obama administration.

Our section on greening the economy focuses on the needs of communities dependent on the fossil industry, as they transition toward sustainability. We also found an uplifting story from Ohio, where an electric vehicle car-sharing program is key to lifting marginalized people out of poverty.

Our friends in the Pacific Northwest just experienced a horrible week, and the deadly heat wave had climate change’s fingerprints all over it. Of course, news about long-duration battery storage, modernizing the grid, and electrifying the transportation sector all mention great tools for fighting back – but the fossil fuel industry remains focused on selling as much planet-cooking product as possible before their party’s over. Two reports underscore the industry’s push for profit, and their liberal use of influence and deception.

We’ll wrap with news you can use about avoiding plastic food and beverage containers – including what these do to your health and the environment. But first, we’re popping a cork to celebrate what appears to be the collapse of plans for the Goldboro liquefied natural gas export facility in Nova Scotia, and hoping its demise sufficiently shakes the foundations of the Weymouth compressor station to topple that project too.

For even more environmental news, info, and events, check out the latest newsletters from our colleagues at Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT) and Berkshire Zero Waste Initiative (BZWI)!

— The NFGiM Team

PEAKING POWER PLANTS

As Pittsfield power plant seeks permit renewal, environmental groups call for clean-energy transition
By Danny Jin, The Berkshire Eagle
July 1, 2021

PITTSFIELD — With the air-quality permit for a Merrill Road power plant set to expire in October, several local groups want the plant’s owner to consider switching to cleaner alternatives.

Maryland-based private equity firm Hull Street Energy owns the plant at 235 Merrill Road and has filed for a renewal of its permit. But, a coalition of the Berkshire Environmental Action Team and 20 other local groups is concerned about pollution from the gas-fired plant, which sits next to Allendale Elementary School and is within a mile of Pittsfield’s Morningside neighborhood.

A “peaker” power plant, Pittsfield Generating, typically runs only a few days a year, during the highest points of electricity demand. The plant ran just 5 percent of the time in 2019 and 2 percent of the time in 2020, according to research group Synapse Energy.

But, the approximately 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 3 tons of nitrous oxide emitted in 2020 have local climate groups and others worried about negative health effects. They want Hull Street Energy, which declined to comment to The Eagle, to consider clean-energy alternatives such as batteries, which store energy to be released when demand is high.

“They’re moving ahead with that permit, and we would like them to reconsider,” Rosemary Wessel, director of BEAT’s No Fracked Gas in Mass initiative, said of Hull Street Energy. “We would like them to meet with us and talk about transitioning to clean energy. Folks will be concerned that this plant will be continuing to operate and polluting the air that residents breathe.”

Four elected officials signed on to a June 2 letter that the coalition sent to Hull Street Energy, but Wessel said the company has yet to respond. State Sen. Adam Hinds, D-Pittsfield; state Rep. Paul Mark, D-Peru; state Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, D-Pittsfield; and state Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli, D-Lenox, signed the letter. (There are no peaker plants in the district represented by state Rep. John Barrett III, D-North Adams.)

Meanwhile, coalition leaders and elected officials have had “wonderfully cooperative” communications, Wessel said, with Cogentrix Energy, the owner of two other local peakers. Wessel said she sees the conversations with Cogentrix, which owns a peaker on Doreen Street in Pittsfield and one on Woodland Road in Lee, as a model for the coalition to pursue with Hull Street Energy.
» Read article

Letter: Few real answers on peaker plant
From Carol Hautau, Salem, in The Salem News
June 28, 2021

At last Monday’s community forum (“Opponents: Power plant changes a start,” June 24), the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC) presented Project 2015A, a plan to build a gas- and oil-fired peaker plant in Peabody.

The meeting did nothing to dispel the feeling that MMWEC and the Peabody Municipal Light Plant have kept this project below the radar to avoid public scrutiny. The panelists took pains to spell out how they met the letter of the law about public notice and supplied the audience with a numbing amount of technical information, which silenced discussion and did not inform or respond to concerns. Long, complex jargon-filled speeches (forward capacity market, hedge discounts) seemed intended to convince those present that the panelists and the entities they represented were the only ones who could be depended on to make the right decision for the communities involved.

The real question of the day — why construct a fossil fuel-burning energy plant in this age of climate disruption — was not addressed adequately. Wind, solar, wave and tidal energy may be intermittent sources today, but battery technology will soon solve that problem. Rather than finding a green solution to their energy reliability needs, the Project 2015A crew held up the hypothetical conversion of this new fossil-fuel plant to green hydrogen, a highly explosive, difficult to transport fuel barely out of its developmental diapers. Green hydrogen sounds an awful lot like “clean coal”— a concept that is thoroughly discredited.
» Read article

142 Tesla Megapacks power on to create giant new battery, replacing gas peaker plant in California
By Fred Lambert, Electrek
June 30, 2021

A new 142-Tesla Megapack project has been turned on in California’s Ventura County to create a giant new battery that is replacing a gas peaker plant.

The project is called the Saticoy battery storage system, and it came about when the local community in Oxnard fought against having a new gas-powered peaker plant to help respond to the energy demand during peak times.

Instead, they settled on a proposal from Arevon Asset Management (Arevon), a renewable energy company, to deploy a massive 100 megawatt/400 megawatt-hour battery system to help power the peak energy demand.

The community was about to get a polluting [262MW] gas power plant near the beach, and instead, they now have one of the largest energy storage sites in US, and it was deployed in just nine months.

They are using 142 Tesla Megapacks, the automaker’s largest energy storage solution (pictured above).

Carmen Ramirez, Ventura County District 5 Supervisor, commented on the project:

“Saying no to a gas peaker plant and yes to battery-stored energy has provided our community with a nonpolluting power plant, increased our tax base, and created good jobs and ultimately better health for the people. This project is truly a testament to Oxnard’s determination and resilience to modernize and better our community.”

The Tesla Megapacks receive electricity from Southern California Edison (SCE) under the terms of a 20-year purchase and sale agreement.
» Blog editor’s note: According to a 2017 article in the Los Angeles Times, the gas power plant this battery system replaced was intended to be sized at 262MW (inserted into article, above).
» Read article

» More about peaker plants

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

3 Environmental Activists Arrested After Occupying Waltham Energy Company Offices Overnight
By Miriam Wasser, WBUR
June 30, 2021

After more than 24 hours of occupying the Waltham offices of Canadian energy giant Enbridge, three environmental activists were arrested Wednesday afternoon by Waltham police.

“We are here because the Line 3 [pipline in Minnesota] needs to be stopped,” protester Samie Hayward said to officers shortly before being taken into custody. “And we are here in solidarity with [those fighting] the Weymouth Compressor.”

The protest began at around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday when more than 60 activists walked into the office building that houses Enbridge’s Northeast U.S. headquarters. Some played musical instruments while others sang or chanted slogans like “we are the protectors.” Many held signs that read “Stop Enbridge. Stop Line 3” and “Enbridge Profits from Environmental Injustice.”

The protestors, who said they were affiliated with the local activist group Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station (FRRACS) and standing in solidarity with the Indigenous-led Giniw Collective in Minnesota, accused Enbridge of “committing crimes against humanity” and perpetrating climate change by constructing and operating controversial fossil fuel projects like the Weymouth Compressor and the Line 3 oil pipeline.

“I’m really alarmed about climate change and how poorly as a society we are dealing with it, and I’m here because there are companies like Enbridge that have been given social license to continue doing what they’re doing,” said one of the protesters, Jeff Gang.

“They’ve built this compressor in Weymouth, which is dangerous and a disaster for the climate, as well as being deeply unjust for the people who live around it. And now they’re trying to build the pipeline, Line 3, cutting through historically Indigenous lands and continuing the circle of genocide that’s been perpetrated on Indigenous people.”

After approximately 20 minutes of chanting and singing in the office Tuesday, Waltham police arrived on the scene and told the protesters they were trespassing. Most of the activists left the building, but several stayed — and 13 spent the night.

Equipped with a list of demands, they repeatedly told officers that they wouldn’t leave until those demands were met. At one point, protester Wen Stephenson picked up a bullhorn and read the list out loud:

That the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Department immediately cease its dangerous blockade of Anishinaabe peoples’ privately-owned #StopLine3 camp and release all arrested protesters.
The immediate halt to Line 3 Pipeline construction and drilling near the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
The shutdown of Enbridge’s Natural Gas Compressor Station in Weymouth, Mass.
The shutdown of Enbridge’s West Roxbury Lateral gas pipeline in Boston, Mass.
The shutdown of the Enbridge-supplied Alton Gas project threatening Mi’kmaq land and water in Nova Scotia.

In an email, Enbridge spokesman Max Bergeron wrote: “As a company, we recognize the rights of individuals and groups to express their views legally and peacefully. We don’t tolerate illegal activities of any kind including trespassing, vandalism, or other mischief.”
» Read article

Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price
Via an unprecedented wave of lawsuits, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for the devastation caused by fossil fuels
By Chris McGreal, The Guardian
June 30, 2021
» Read article

» More about protests and actions

LEGISLATION

Congress Votes To Restore Regulations On Climate-Warming Methane Emissions
Reducing greenhouse gases, means tackling pollution from the oil and gas industry
By Jeff Brady, NPR
June 25, 2021

WASHINGTON, D.C. (NPR) — Both houses of Congress have taken a step toward more vigorously regulating climate-warming methane leaks from the oil and gas industry, a move supporters say is key to achieving President Biden’s ambitious climate goals.

On Friday, House lawmakers voted to reverse a Trump rollback by passing resolutions under the Congressional Review Act, which gives them the ability to undo agency rules passed in the last months of the previous administration. The Senate approved the measure in April.

“What we’re voting on today is the legislative equivalent of a double negative. This is the repeal of a repeal,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said at a press conference before the April vote.

Biden is expected to sign the resolutions, which would reverse an Environmental Protection Agency methane rule finalized last year and leave in place a stricter 2016 EPA rule, finalized during the Obama administration.

Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas. When released before it burns, it’s a far more potent greenhouse gas than even carbon dioxide. But it does not linger in the atmosphere nearly as long. That means eliminating leaks now could have an immediate effect on global warming.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in April that methane and carbon dioxide “continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic response.”

The oil and gas industry is the largest source of human-caused methane emissions. A recent study by the Environmental Defense Fund found that cutting methane emissions now could slow the rate of global warming by as much as 30%.
» Read article

» More about legislation

GREENING THE ECONOMY

As the US Pursues Clean Energy and the Climate Goals of the Paris Agreement, Communities Dependent on the Fossil Fuel Economy Look for a Just Transition
A new report identifies areas from Appalachia to Alaska that will need help to keep their employment, wages and tax bases from falling steeply as coal, oil and gas are phased out.
By Judy Fahys, Inside Climate News
June 28, 2021

Perhaps the proudest achievement of Michael Kourianos’ first term as mayor of Price, Utah was helping to make the local university hub the state’s first to run entirely on clean energy. It’s a curious position for the son, brother and grandchild of coal miners who’s worked in local coal-fired power plants for 42 years.

Kourianos sees big changes on the horizon brought by shifts in world energy markets and customer demands, as well as in politics. The mines and plants that powered a bustling economy here in Carbon County and neighboring Emery County for generations are gone or winding down, and Kourianos is hoping to win reelection so he can keep stoking the entrepreneurial energy and partnerships that are moving his community forward.

“That freight train is coming at us,” he said. “You look at all the other communities that were around during the early times of coal, they’re not around.

“That’s my fear,” he said. “That’s my driving force.”

New research from Resources for the Future points out that hundreds of areas like central Utah are facing painful hardships because of the clean-energy transformation that will be necessary if the United States hopes to reach the Paris agreement’s goals to slow climate change. Lost jobs and wages, a shrinking population and an erosion of the tax base that supports roads, schools and community services—they’re all costs of the economic shift that will be paid by those whose hard work fueled American prosperity for so long.

“If we can address those challenges by helping communities diversify, helping people find new economic growth drivers and new economic opportunities, that might lessen some of the opposition to moving forward with the ambitious climate policy that we need,” said the report’s author, Daniel Raimi, who is also a lecturer at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
» Read article
» Read the report: Mapping the US Energy Economy to Inform Transition Planning

Electric car-share program helps underserved and unemployed Ohioans
“No car, no job. No job, no car.” The car-share program is part of a larger effort in Lorain County, Ohio, using a Paradox Prize grant to address the dilemma.
By Kathiann M. Kowalski, Energy News Network
July 1, 2021

Most drivers of electric vehicles don’t experience homelessness or the urgency of finding a job after addiction, prison or other problems. Yet those are precisely the people whom an innovative car-sharing program in Ohio aims to help.

Place to Recover Training and Resource Center in Sheffield Township and Catholic Charities’ St. Elizabeth Center in Lorain are now sharing an electric Chevrolet Bolt to help their clients. Funding comes from part of a $100,000 Paradox Prize grant to those and other organizations in Lorain County.

Representatives of the programs spoke at Green Energy Ohio’s 2021 Electric Vehicle Tour in Oberlin on June 8.

“This electric car-share program has really benefited marginalized populations who otherwise would not be able to access employment or resources to help them get employment, like getting to the doctor and getting to interviews and getting training,” said Wendy Caldwell, chief executive officer at Place to Recover. The organization helps people reentering society after incarceration, substance abuse treatment or other circumstances.

Just a couple of miles away, St. Elizabeth Center provides overnight shelter for adult men, as well as daily hot meals and other social services for people in need. The Catholic Charities facility uses the car to get clients to doctor’s appointments, legal appointments, meetings with social services, housing interviews and other places.

“I can’t emphasize enough how important that is to these people, how meaningful it is,” said Matthew Peters, an emergency services coordinator for Catholic Charities. “How much hope it gives them to know that there’s a network and a community of people around them who are bright and motivated and empathetic and concerned and making this possible!”
» Read article

» More about greening the economy

CLIMATE

Global Warming Cauldron Boils Over in the Northwest in One of the Most Intense Heat Waves on Record Worldwide
As residents prepare for even more temperature records to fall in the heat dome forecast to persist for days, scientists see a heavy climate change fingerprint.
By Judy Fahys, Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News
June 29, 2021

The latest in a seemingly endless series of heat waves around the world hit the Pacific Northwest last weekend and will continue through the week, showing that even regions with cool coastlines and lush forests cannot avoid the blistering extremes of global warming.

Temperatures across most of Oregon and Washington spiked 20 to 30 degrees Celsius above normal, with even hotter conditions expected through Tuesday driving concerns about impacts to human health, infrastructure and ecosystems.

In a Twitter thread over the weekend, Ben Noll, a meteorologist with the New Zealand National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, reported that Portland, Oregon would be hotter than 99.9 percent of the rest of the planet on Sunday. “The only places expected to be hotter: Africa’s Sahara Desert, Persian Gulf, California’s deserts,” he tweeted.

The intensity of the heat wave, measured by how far temperatures are spiking above normal, is among the greatest ever measured globally. The extremes are on par with a 2003 European heat wave that killed about 70,000 people, and a 2013 heat wave in Australia, when meteorologists added new shades of dark purple to their maps to show unprecedented temperatures.

And the more extreme the temperature records, climate scientists said, the more obvious the fingerprint of global warming will be on the heat wave. But even among climate scientists, the biggest concern was the immediate impacts of the record shattering temperatures.

“I shudder to think what the mortality rate will be from this event,” said Phil Mote, a climate scientist with the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. Research shows that early season heat waves like this one are deadlier than those happening later in the year because people haven’t acclimatized yet, he added.

Local weather service offices warned people to cool themselves with a reminder that heat was the leading cause of weather-related fatalities between 1991 and 2020. But experts and officials warned that people in the region, where there are fewer people with air conditioning than without it, are ill-equipped to protect themselves from persistent triple-digit temperatures.
» Read article

» More about climate

ENERGY STORAGE

Why a seasoned energy executive sees a bright future in long-duration energy storage from ESS
Executive interview with Eric Dresselhuys, CEO of ESS Inc.
By Jennifer Runyon, Energy Storage World (sponsored content)
June 29, 2021

When Eric Dresselhuys got a call from the board of directors at ESS earlier this spring asking him to come on as Chief Executive Officer of the company that provides an Iron Flow Battery (IFB) for long-duration storage, he didn’t hesitate.

“It was a pretty easy yes,” he said in an interview.

Dresselhuys isn’t new to the energy space. In fact, he was creating technology that electric utilities could use to make their grids smarter before the words “smart grid” were well known. In 2002, he founded Silver Spring Networks, which combined IoT with big data for smart grids. In 2013 Silver Spring went public and in 2018 it was acquired by Itron.

Dresselhuys sees great growth for long-duration storage, which he defines as energy storage technology that can take energy, most likely produced by renewable sources like wind and solar, and store it for a very long time, well beyond the understood and accepted maximum of four hours that lithium-ion technology is used for.

“We’re talking about electrifying everything. We want to take the carbon out of not just the power system but the economy. And by the way, we have to do that cost effectively and with no toxicity,” he said.

We won’t be able to achieve those goals without cost-effective, safe long-duration storage, he said.

Indeed, a world powered by upwards of 25-30% wind and solar still needs electricity 24 hours a day. Further, many clean energy advocates point to a scenario in which we overbuild vast amounts of wind and solar power generating facilities — because their cost to build is so low — and then store the power so it can be used later. A good way to store gigawatts of excess energy safely and reliably is through flow batteries like the systems ESS manufactures.
» Read article

» More about energy storage

MODERNIZING THE GRID

US grid needs overhaul to keep up with renewable revolution, says GE exec, Sen. Heinrich
By Scott Voorhis, Utility Dive
June 22, 2021

As power companies and startups alike roll out new solar and wind projects, the U.S. needs new investment in its electric grid to keep up with the changing sector, said participants in the “Energy Forward: Reinvent the Grid” discussion.

Over the last century, industry and government’s focus when it came to the electric grid was ensuring stability, said Colin Parris, senior vice president and chief technology officer at General Electric’s GE Digital.

But renewable sources like wind and solar are by their very nature “dynamic,” he said, noting the flow depends, to some extent, on the weather:

“The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,” Parris said.

The challenge is adding renewable sources while maintaining stability. That means building new lines that connect to renewable sources, some of which — like offshore wind farms — may be in remote locations. It also means developing AI capabilities “to forecast problems” and “real-time capabilities to control the flow of electricity,” Parris said.

The transition, Parris said, is akin to going from a one-lane road to a “multilane highway.”

Karen Wayland, CEO of the GridWise Alliance, which consists of major utilities as well as companies including IBM and GE, offered a similar assessment.

“The grid has to be able to accommodate all of that new load — you have to make sure you know where the load needs [are], and you also have to have a much more flexible grid that can respond to varying loads,” she said.

To that end, Wayland, who was an aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and a former U.S. Energy Department official, said she hopes to see at least $50 billion to address grid issues in the final infrastructure package.
» Read article

» More about modernizing the grid

CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

As car-centric Cape Cod tries to cut emissions, transportation is a challenge
The Massachusetts region’s unique geography and seasonality — and decades of car-centric development — present a challenge for local leaders trying to reduce climate emissions, more than 55% of which comes from transportation.
By Sarah Shemkus, Energy News Network
June 28, 2021

As Cape Cod launches its first strategic plan to slash its greenhouse gas output, the need to rein in transportation emissions is emerging as a substantial challenge for the sprawling, car-centric region.

In April, the Cape Cod Commission regional planning authority released a draft climate action plan that finds transportation is responsible for more than 55% of greenhouse gas emissions in the region. That’s significantly higher than the statewide average of 42%. While the report recommends efforts to increase electric vehicle adoption, strengthen public transit, and shape land-use policies to reduce sprawl, the current development patterns and highly seasonal nature of the economy pose significant obstacles.

“It’s obviously a big challenge,” said Steven Tupper, transportation program manager for the commission. “We have a unique seasonality and a unique geography.”

Cape Cod, a 15-town region covering nearly 400 square miles in southeastern Massachusetts, is an iconic tourist area notable for its beaches and as the summer destination for the Kennedy family. Roughly 213,000 people live on the Cape year-round, according to the United States Census Bureau, but that number nearly triples during the summer as vacationers and second-homeowners flock to the region.

The heavy reliance on cars on Cape Cod has its roots in the historical development of the region. Until the late 1800s, Cape residents were largely clustered into small harborside villages that sprung up around maritime industries. The transformation into a tourist destination began around the turn of the century and accelerated from 1950 on. Neighborhoods full of detached homes with spacious yards began filling in space between formerly isolated village centers.

Today, the result is a spread-out population that is dependent on cars to reach doctor’s appointments, shop for groceries, or visit friends.

“There’s going to be, without question, the need for automobiles in this region,” Tupper said.
» Read article

Altered Microstructure Improves Organic-Based, Solid State Lithium EV Battery
Ethanol Solvent Boosts Battery Energy Density, A Step Toward Better EVs Of The Future
By Nicole Johnson, University of Houston
June 17, 2021

Only 2% of vehicles are electrified to date, but that is projected to reach 30% in 2030. A key toward improving the commercialization of electric vehicles (EVs) is to heighten their gravimetric energy density – measured in watt hours per kilogram – using safer, easily recyclable materials that are abundant. Lithium-metal in anodes are considered the “holy grail” for improving energy density in EV batteries compared to incumbent options like graphite at 240 Wh/kg in the race to reach more competitive energy density at 500 Wh/kg.

Yan Yao, Cullen Professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston, and UH post doctorate Jibo Zhang are taking on this challenge with Rice University colleagues. In a paper published June 17 in Joule, Zhang, Yao and team demonstrate a two-fold improvement in energy density for organic-based, solid state lithium batteries by using a solvent-assisted process to alter the electrode microstructure. Zhaoyang Chen, Fang Hao, Yanliang Liang of UH, Qing Ai, Tanguy Terlier, Hua Guo and Jun Lou of Rice University co-authored the paper.

“We are developing low-cost, earth-abundant, cobalt-free organic-based cathode materials for a solid-state battery that will no longer require scarce transition metals found in mines,” said Yao. “This research is a step forward in increasing EV battery energy density using this more sustainable alternative.” Yao is also Principal Investigator with the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH (TcSUH).

Any battery includes an anode, also known as negative electrode, and a cathode, also known as positive electrode, that are separated in a battery by a porous membrane. Lithium ions flow through an ionic conductor – an electrolyte, which allows for the charging and discharging of electrons that generates electricity for, say, a vehicle.

Electrolytes are usually liquid, but that is not necessary – they can also be solid, a relatively new concept. This novelty, combined with a lithium-metal anode, can prevent short-circuiting, improve energy density and enable faster charging.

Cathodes typically determine the capacity and voltage of a battery and are subsequently the most expensive part of batteries due to usage of scarce materials like cobalt – set to reach a 65,000-ton deficit in 2030. Cobalt-based cathodes are almost exclusively used in solid-state batteries due to their excellent performance; only recently have organic compound-based lithium batteries (OBEM-Li) emerged as a more abundant, cleaner alternative that is more easily recycled.
» Read article
» Obtain the published paper

» More about clean transportation

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

In Video, Exxon Lobbyist Describes Efforts to Undercut Climate Action
On the tape, made in a Greenpeace sting, he described working with “shadow groups” to fight climate science, and detailed efforts to weaken President Biden’s proposals to burn less oil.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times
June 30, 2021

The veteran oil-industry lobbyist was told he was meeting with a recruiter. But the video call, which was secretly recorded, was part of an elaborate sting operation by an individual working for the environmental group Greenpeace UK.

During the call, Keith McCoy, a senior director of federal relations for Exxon Mobil, described how the oil and gas giant targeted a number of influential United States senators in an effort to weaken climate action in President Biden’s flagship infrastructure plan. That plan now contains few of the ambitious ideas initially proposed by Mr. Biden to cut the burning of fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.

Mr. McCoy also said on the recording that Exxon’s support for a tax on carbon dioxide was “a great talking point” for the oil company, but that he believes the tax will never happen. He also said that the company has in the past aggressively fought climate science through “shadow groups.”

On the video call recorded by Greenpeace, Mr. McCoy defended the company’s efforts to mislead the public on climate change, even as the company’s own scientists were recognizing greenhouse gas emissions as a risk to the planet. “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not,” Mr. McCoy said. “Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true.”

Mr. McCoy didn’t identify the groups. Exxon Mobil has spent millions of dollars funding conservative groups that challenge established climate science. “But there’s nothing illegal about that,” he said. “We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”
» Read article

Fossil Fuel Companies Are Promoting ‘Lower Carbon,’ ‘Responsibly Sourced’ Oil and Gas
The oil and gas industry is looking to capitalize off an increasingly-popular socially responsible investing wave that emphasizes the environment.
By Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog
April 26, 2021

This month, EQT, the nation’s largest natural gas producer, plans to launch a pilot project that will certify it to start selling not just natural gas, but something it calls “responsibly sourced natural gas.”

EQT’s move comes on the heels of a similar announcement from Chesapeake Energy, one of the pioneers of fracking which recently emerged from bankruptcy. Both EQT and Chesapeake will seek certification from outside providers, including a business called Project Canary, which touts its ability to collect data on methane emissions and pollutants from oil and gas wells and offers a certification it calls TrustWell™.

“There is a generation of Millennials around the globe who have written off fossil fuels,” Chris Romer, co-founder of Project Canary, told the oil and gas industry trade publication Rigzone this month. “We need to address the brand problem.”

But it’s difficult to pin down what “responsibly sourced” gas means, in part because of a growing number of competing certification programs that all offer their own definitions. When it comes to Project Canary in particular, the company says its standards are high — and that there’s not enough gas from its most “responsibly sourced” wells to meet demand from buyers.

These latest branding efforts arrive amid a broad ESG investment wave that emphasizes the ways businesses approach environmental, societal, and corporate governance issues. Industry advisors are increasingly offering up new ideas about how oil and gas companies can use the language of ESG to market their fossil fuel as different from the competition’s.
» Read article

» More about fossil fuels

LIQUEFIED NATURAL GAS

The Goldboro LNG plant scheme has collapsed
By Tim Bousquet, The Halifax Examiner
July 2, 2021

“While Pieridae has made tremendous progress in advancing the Goldboro LNG Project, as of June 30, 2021, we have not been able to meet all of the key conditions necessary to make a final investment decision. Following consultation with our Board, we have made the decision to move Goldboro LNG in a new direction.” (Alfred Sorensen, Chief Executive Officer, Pieridae Energy.)

To be clear, Pieridae has not made “tremendous progress” progress towards developing the plant: not one shovelful of dirt has been turned, and so far as I can see, the company hasn’t gotten a penny in actual investment money towards its $14 billion (yes, billion with a B) goal, although it did enter a preposterous $206 million loan scheme; as Joan Baxter reported in April:

Pieridae financed the purchase of Shell’s aging assets at three sour gas fields in Waterton, Jumping Pound, and Caroline, with a loan of $206 million from Third Eye Capital and private placement.

One of Pieridae’s directors, Mark Horrox, is a principal of Third Eye Capital, and a director of one of its portfolio companies, Erikson National Energy, which bought about 14% of Pieridae in the private placement, a $20 million investment that is now worth just a bit more than half that.

While the parties to the loan disclosed an interest rate of 15%, the fine print in the audited statements states that Pieridae has an obligation to Third Eye Capital — namely a fee of $50 million if it does not agree to purchase some “certain petroleum and natural gas properties from Third Eye.”

As the Examiner has reported extensively, Sorensen has been going hat-in-hand to the Canadian government, asking for nearly $1 billion in financing from the Canadian public. Evidently, the federal government said “no dice,” and the entire Goldboro scheme has crumbled.

Dead On Arrival.

What about the “strategic alternatives that could make an LNG Project more compatible with the current environment”? The technical term for this comment is “bullshit.”
» Read article

Pieridae Evaluating Goldboro LNG Strategic Alternatives
By Pieridae Energy Limited, Yahoo Finance
July 2, 2021

CALGARY, Alberta (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Pieridae Energy Limited (“Pieridae” or the “Company”) (PEA.TO) today released the following statement from Chief Executive Officer Alfred Sorensen with respect to a future path for the Company’s Goldboro LNG Project:

‘While Pieridae has made tremendous progress in advancing the Goldboro LNG Project, as of June 30, 2021, we have not been able to meet all of the key conditions necessary to make a final investment decision. Following consultation with our Board, we have made the decision to move Goldboro LNG in a new direction. The Project’s fundamentals remain strong: robust LNG demand from Europe and high global LNG prices, Indigenous participation, a net-zero emissions pathway forward, and support from jurisdictions across Canada. This speaks to our ongoing efforts to find a partner to take advantage of these opportunities.

That said, it became apparent that cost pressures and time constraints due to COVID-19 have made building the current version of the LNG Project impractical.

We will now assess options and analyze strategic alternatives that could make an LNG Project more compatible with the current environment. [emphasis added – see story above…] In addition, the Company will continue its work to further optimize the operation and development of our extensive Foothills resources and midstream assets, including our carbon capture and sequestration and blue power development.’
» Read statement

» More about liquefied natural gas

PLASTICS, HEALTH, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Here’s What Happens When You Eat From Plastic Containers
By Darlena Cunha, EcoWatch
July 1, 2021

Drinking water is supposed to be good for you, but what happens when you diligently carry that disposable water bottle around all day, to remind yourself to take a sip? With that sip, you take in an undue amount of plastic, according to recent research. And that’s not all.

Takeout cartons, shelf-stable wrapping, those water bottles, even canned goods can be the culprit. And while no one likes the idea of consuming plastic, most of us still shrug and throw that container in the microwave.

4 Reasons Not to Eat or Drink From Plastic Containers:

The plastic transfers from the containers to your food.

Humans ingest at least 74,000 particles of microplastic a year, according to research in The Journal of Food Science. A lot of this comes from our takeout containers. In fact, we could be ingesting more than 200 particles a week, just from our plastic food storage units.

Microplastics are bad for you.

We’re ingesting plastics, so what? They don’t just make their way through our system and out of our bodies. They can stay with us.

Scientists have found that microplastics can cross the hardy membrane that protects the brain from foreign bodies in the bloodstream, at least in animals. They are carcinogenic to humans.

There is no such thing as safe plastic.

It’s not just the phthalates. Plastics contain multitudes of chemicals, including bisphenols A, S and F (BPAs, BPSs, and BPFs), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Chemicals like these have been linked to cancers, weakened immune systems, organ problems, and developmental delays in kids. Bisphenols specifically (particularly BPA) have been identified as endocrine-disrupting and linked to obesity. Research also shows that BPAs make it more difficult for women to conceive and increase the risk of miscarriages.

These containers are bad for the environment.

We are literally filling our world with plastic garbage. Since plastic came into common use in the 1950s, we have produced more than 8 billion tons of it. Only 10 percent of that, at most, has been recycled.
» Read article

» More about plastics, health & environment

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Weekly News Check-In 5/7/21

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Welcome back.

Out here in the Berkshires, we’re working to raise awareness of health and emissions problems associated with fossil fueled peaking power plants. We’re focused on replacing our existing peakers with a combination of battery storage, renewable energy, and energy efficiency measures. Meanwhile, our friends on Boston’s north shore are mounting a similar effort to avoid construction of a new gas plant in Peabody. Plans for that progressed quietly for six years, and largely flew under the radar until very recently.

The struggle to retire/replace/avoid natural gas peakers provides an excellent segue into the murky world of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Every transaction requires a massive amount of computation, and huge banks of computers are humming away right now to handle that traffic. Annual energy consumption to support cryptocurrencies surpasses that of the entire country of Sweden – and that will only rise as the value and utilization of these currencies increases. Devoting massive amounts of electric energy (no matter how it’s generated) to supporting electronic currencies runs counter to climate mitigation efforts. New York state, host to a growing number of cryptocurrency computing centers, is considering placing a 3-year moratorium on “crypto mining” while it studies whether it can support these currencies while still meeting its emissions targets.

We have an update on state-level efforts to criminalize protests, and also a good article explaining the history, current status, and potential future of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Recall that courageous and sustained resistance at Standing Rock in 2016-17, largely by indigenous people, raised awareness and rallied popular opposition to this and other pipelines. Republican-dominated state legislatures (backed by the fossil fuel industry) responded with a growing arsenal of draconian laws aimed at raising the stakes for people and organizations who engage in civil action – in the form of steep fines and long prison sentences.

Like it or not, greening the economy is going to require a lot of mining. Projected demand for minerals like lithium, silicon, copper, and aluminum outpace our rate of acquisition. Meanwhile, we’re learning that some of our schemes to benefit the climate are under-performing. Forest carbon offsets involve tricky accounting, and a new California study exposes some of the pitfalls. Lesson: there’s no substitute for actually not burning stuff.

EV enthusiasts are impatiently awaiting the arrival of solid state batteries, and expect them to seriously juice the potential for clean transportation. This article explains the technology, why it’s causing so much buzz, and why you can’t have it for a while.

Notes from the fossil fuel industry include Joe Nolan’s promotion to CEO of Eversource, New England’s largest utility. Congratulations, Mr. Nolan. We’re encouraged that you spent 25 years expanding Eversource’s renewable energy portfolio – which sounds better if we ignore the fact that the utility scored public relations points off that program while it worked even harder to expand sales of natural gas. And we open this section with an article exposing Eversource’s leadership in an industry effort fight electrification and lock in natural gas consumption for years to come.

We close with a strange, developing biomass story from the western Massachusetts town of Ashfield. Seems like California-based Clean Energy Technologies (CETY) plans to build a high temperature ablative fast pyrolysis reactor in town as a first step to other, similar-but-larger facilities elsewhere in the region. A press release indicated town support, which surprised town officials who knew nothing about the plans….

For even more environmental news, info, and events, check out the latest newsletters from our colleagues at Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT) and Berkshire Zero Waste Initiative (BZWI)!

— The NFGiM Team

PEAKING POWER PLANTS

Letter: Keep clean air a priority as Pittsfield ‘peaker plant’ is up for permit
By Susan Purser, Becket, in The Berkshire Eagle
May 4, 2021

To the editor: Currently, we have a chance to improve the air quality in Pittsfield especially on very hot or cold days.

Pittsfield Generating, a “peaker plant” on Merrill Road, provides electricity during periods of very high power demand. Unfortunately, this plant is an old facility and is quite polluting to the surrounding neighborhoods of Morningside and Allendale when it runs a few times a year.

The Pittsfield Generating is up for renewal of its air quality permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection in the next few months. This is an excellent opportunity to bring this plant into the 21st century with a combination of solar, battery storage and conservation, or, if needed, to be shut down. An upgrade to the plant not only provides for cleaner air but continues the flow of revenue from the plant to the city of Pittsfield.

There will be a DEP public hearing regarding the permit soon. Residents of Pittsfield are strongly encouraged to attend or submit comments.

Further information will be available at tinyurl.com/PeakerPermit. In addition, please sign the peaker petition at tinyurl.com/PeakerPetition.

We all deserve cleaner air to breathe. Let’s make that happen.
» Read letter

North Shore Officials, Peabody Light Spar Over Proposed Gas Plant
Officials cite resident safety and environmental concerns, while Peabody Light said the plant is needed to meet surge capacity requirements.
By Scott Souza, Patch
May 6, 2021

PEABODY, MA —Growing environmental and quality-of-life concerns surrounding a proposed gas power plant in Peabody are in conflict with the Peabody Municipal Light Plant’s insistence that the plant is necessary to meet surge capacity requirements.

The long-proposed plant moved forward in relative obscurity until recent months when advocacy groups began to publicize the project and both residents and elected officials started questioning whether the congested city is right for the plant they say is in conflict with the state’s new climate law.

In a recent letter to the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, State Rep. Sally Kerans (D-Danvers) said the Waters River substation location near the Peabody and Danvers line already encompasses several “environmental burdens,” including Route 128, a propane company, a pipeline.

“The plan before you is for a gas turbine that can rev up to full capacity in 10 minutes, a new 200,000(-gallon) oil tank, a smokestack, an ammonia storage (container), among several components,” she wrote. “All of these bring to mind legitimate concerns about the impact on our environment and our health.”

She also questioned whether renewal energies have been [exhaustively considered] as an alternative to the new plant and why there has been so little public input allowed in the five years of the proposal’s development.
» Read letter

Peabody power plant plans caught city off-guard
By Erin Nolan, The Salem News
May 4, 2021

PEABODY — About three weeks ago, Councilor-at-Large Jon Turco received a notice about a public hearing related to the building of a new gas-powered plant in the city. He thought it was a new project.

“I read through it, and truthfully I thought, ‘this must be in the beginning phases of a project, so let me learn about this,’” he said about the three-page document informing him of an upcoming Department of Public Utilities meeting. “Then through that meeting, I learned this was taking place since 2017 and had been voted on by our Light Plant. Yet there had been no correspondence from the Light Plant to the council, no correspondence from the state to the council, even though I believe this a project which will have an impact on Ward 3 in Peabody.”

Turco isn’t alone. Other local and state elected officials said they weren’t aware of the years-old plans to build a 60-megawatt power plant at Peabody Municipal Light Plant’s Waters River substation, behind the Pulaski Street industrial park. But both the Light Plant and the organization which would operate the plant said there were no attempts to keep the project secret from public officials or Peabody residents.

The plans to build the plant, which would be owned and operated by Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company, were unanimously approved by the light commission in 2017.

“There are 11 members of the City Council and all or all but a few were completely caught off guard,” Turco said. “That is a problem, because we were elected to represent these people.”
» Read article

» More about peaker plants

CRYPTOCURRENCY

As bitcoin mining hooks into Upstate NY power plants, some wonder if it’s just more hot air
By Glenn Coin, Syracuse.com
May 5, 2021

Syracuse, N.Y. – By next year, owners of a gas-fired power plant on Seneca Lake hope to be producing enough electricity to power 85,000 homes.

But much of that electricity won’t turn on lights in living rooms. It will instead stay on site at the plant in Dresden, powering up to 27,000 computers that will run 24 hours a day to snag increasingly rare virtual currency called bitcoin.

The plant worries climate change activists, who say the extraordinary amount of energy consumed in what’s known as bitcoin mining will make it hard for New York to meet its aggressive climate change goals.

“We’re talking about burning more fossil fuels to make fake money in the middle of climate change, which we view as insane,” said Yvonne Taylor, vice president of the environmental group Seneca Lake Guardian.

The Greenidge Generation Holdings plant is part of a growing trend. Lucrative cryptocurrency centers gobble up huge amounts of energy, so much so that they take over power plants or old factories to use for themselves. Several have already set up shop in Upstate New York, where energy is cheap and cold weather reduces the cost of cooling thousands of computer processors, each of which emits as much heat as a 1,400-watt hair dryer.

New York will have to grapple with the surging demand of bitcoin mining if the state expects to slash greenhouse gas emissions, said Tristan Brown, a professor of sustainable resources management at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

“Bitcoin does raise some interesting questions,” Brown said. “Is this something we necessarily want to have contributing to our (electrical) demand? What type of value does it bring the state economically? That’s ultimately what state policy will have to determine.”

While those questions are being debated, state legislators in both houses have introduced bills to impose a three-year moratorium on cryptocurrency mining operations.

“This is literally the biggest environmental issue we’re facing,” said Assemblywoman Anna Kelles, D-Ithaca, who wrote and is sponsoring the moratorium bill in the Assembly. “If this does take over a lot of power plants, the greenhouse impact alone will counter all the work we’ve been doing. We need to understand it better.”
» Read article

Crypto mining ban considered in New York following environmental concerns
Cryptocurrency mining could be suspended in the state of New York
By Joel Khalili, TechRadar
May 6, 2021

The practice of cryptocurrency mining could be banned on environmental grounds in the state of New York after a new bill was placed under review.

Tabled by Democrat senator Kevin Parker, the bill seeks to establish a three-year moratorium on crypto mining, with the goal of preventing irreparable damage to the state’s sustainability ambitions.

The bill was referred to the Committee on Environmental Conservation on May 3 and, if passed, will require crypto miners to undergo an environmental impact review if they are to continue to operate.

“The continued and expanded operation of cryptocurrency mining centers will greatly increase the amount of energy usage in the State of New York and it is reasonable to believe the associated greenhouse gas emissions will irreparably harm compliance with the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.”

The recent surge in the price of cryptocurrencies has placed mining practices under the spotlight. One of the most common grievances with Bitcoin mining in particular has to do with the toll it takes on the environment.

Under the proof-of-work (PoW) system applied by Bitcoin and others like it, mining operations compete to solve complex mathematical problems. The first to do so earns the right to process a block of transactions, in exchange for transaction fees and newly minted cryptocurrency.

Although this system is crucial to maintaining and securing the Bitcoin network, the amount of energy used up by competing miners is astronomical. A recent report from the University of Cambridge claims that Bitcoin uses up more energy on an annual basis than the country of Sweden, at 141.91 TWh/year.
» Read article

» More about cryptocurrency

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

Montana, Kansas, and Arkansas enter the arms race to criminalize protest
The Republican push to criminalize pipeline protests is expanding beyond fossil fuel-producing states.
By Naveena Sadasivam, Grist
May 3, 2021

Montana will become the fourth state this year to pass legislation that increases penalties for trespass on properties with so-called “critical infrastructure” — a long list of facilities including pipelines, refineries, and other oil and gas equipment. The bill punishes those who “materially impede or inhibit operations” of an oil and gas facility with up to 18 months in prison and a fine of $4,500. Those who cause damage to critical infrastructure that costs more than $1,500 could face a jail term of up to 30 years. Kansas and Arkansas passed similar laws earlier this month, and in January Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed a bill that makes trespassing on oil and gas properties a misdemeanor punishable with up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

In total, 15 states have enacted such laws since 2017, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, a nonprofit civil liberties group that has been tracking anti-protest legislation. (Montana will be the sixteenth if the bill gets the governor’s signature.) The most common provisions in these bills include lengthening jail terms so they stretch anywhere between six months and several decades, raising fines to the tune of thousands of dollars, and financially penalizing groups that help organize protests resulting in trespass or damage of critical infrastructure. For instance, trespassing on property with a pipeline in Arkansas is now a Class D felony punishable with up to six years in prison; in contrast, a traditional criminal trespass charge has a maximum of one year of jail time.

“That’s an incredibly harsh and chilling penalty, particularly in the context of environmental protests which occur in or around construction sites for pipelines, where it’s unclear where property lines begin and end,” said Nicholas Robinson, a senior legal advisor with the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. In cases where pipeline companies used eminent domain to seize land, the protesters arrested may be the very property owners who’ve been forced to sell access to their land.
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» More about protests and actions

PIPELINES

Explainer: The Dakota Access Pipeline faces possible closure
By Stephanie Kelly and Devika Kumar, Reuters
May 4, 2021

A U.S. court could order the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) shut in coming weeks, disrupting deliveries of crude oil, and making nearby rail traffic more congested.

WHAT IS DAPL?

The 570,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) Dakota Access pipeline, or DAPL, is the largest oil pipeline out of the Bakken shale basin and has been locked in a legal battle with Native American tribes over whether the line can stay open after a judge scrapped a key environmental permit last year.

A federal judge ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to update the court on its environmental review of the pipeline by May 3 and decide if it believes the line should shut during the process. read more

WHAT IS THE DISPUTE?

Native American tribes long opposed to DAPL say the line endangers Lake Oahe, a critical water source. Pipeline construction under the lake was finished in early 2017 and the line is currently operating. But a judge last year vacated a key permit allowing that service, raising the possibility that the line could close while a thorough environmental review was completed.

Dakota Access oil pipeline’s operators plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, according to a court filing last week. read more
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» More about pipelines

GREENING THE ECONOMY

New climate goals are going to need a lot more minerals
Demand for critical minerals is expected to skyrocket
By Justine Calma, The Verge
May 5, 2021

The world isn’t mining enough minerals to reach a future that runs on clean energy, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel are the building blocks for clean energy economies. Countries can’t meet their new climate goals without them. If supply chains can’t meet skyrocketing demand, mineral shortages could mean clean energy shortages.

Many of the world’s biggest economies have set goals to nearly eliminate climate pollution from fossil fuels in the next few decades. Leading climate scientists have found that greenhouse gas emissions need to reach net zero globally by around 2050 to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

Hitting that 2050 target would require six times more critical minerals than are produced today, the IEA found. For some minerals, the gap between supply and predicted future demand is way bigger. Demand for lithium, for example, is expected to grow 70 times over the next couple decades. But the supply from existing lithium mines and projects under construction can only meet about half the projected demand this decade.

“This mismatch is something that worries us,” Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, said at a press conference today. “Our numbers show that the critical minerals are not a sideshow in our journey to reach climate goals. It’s a part of the main event.”

Batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy storage are the biggest factor driving the potential mineral shortage. An EV requires six times more mineral resources than a car that runs on fossil fuels. Cobalt, nickel, graphite, and manganese are essential for batteries, too.

Wind and solar power generation are also mineral-hungry industries. Wind turbines need rare earth minerals for magnets, while solar panels are made with copper, silicon, and silver. An increase in renewable energy is also spurring the need to modernize electrical grids, which can’t be done without more copper and aluminum.
» Read article
» Read the IEA report

DOE turns its focus toward equity with commitment to lowering solar deployment barriers
By Robert Walton, Utility Dive
May 5, 2021

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on Tuesday announced plans to encourage deployment of more solar and storage in low- and moderate-income communities, including a more than $15 million commitment for technical assistance and to help underserved areas attract investment.

The new initiatives and funding will help advance DOE’s justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) goals, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement, including by expanding access to clean energy and fostering a more diverse solar workforce.

Equity in the clean energy transition was also on the agenda Tuesday at the EE Global Forum. Jigar Shah, head of DOE’s Loan Programs Office, said it is “obvious” that equity issues were not a priority for the office under previous administrations.

Decarbonizing the electricity sector by 2035 will mean delivering clean energy to all communities. Shah, who founded solar company SunEdison, said it can be more difficult or expensive to get renewables projects built in some areas, but DOE is committed to changing that.

The Biden administration is “very committed to equity,” Shah said. But “it is obvious the loan program office has not participated in this issue. We do billion-dollar solar farms and billion-dollar wind farms, or geothermal facilities, or [work with] Ford Motor Co., or a Tesla manufacturing facility.”

To address the disconnect, Shah said DOE “started a listening tour” and has had talks with more than 40 groups including residential solar installers and municipalities “around where they thought we might have the most impact.”
» Read article

» More about greening the economy

CLIMATE

The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere
New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.
By Lisa Song, ProPublica, and James Temple, MIT Technology Review
April 29, 2021

Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high.

But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts.

Beyond the crest of the Klamath Mountains, you descend into an evergreen medley of sugar pines, incense cedars and still more Douglas firs. As you continue into the Cascade Range, you pass through sparser forests dominated by Ponderosa pines. These tall, slender trees with prickly cones thrive in the hotter, drier conditions on the eastern side of the state.

All trees consume carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen and storing the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots. Every ton of carbon sequestered in a living tree is a ton that isn’t contributing to climate change. And that thick coastal forest can easily store twice as much carbon per acre as the trees deeper inland.

This math is crucial to determining the success of California’s forest offset program, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by preserving trees. The state established the program a decade ago as part of its efforts to combat climate change.

But ecology is messy. The boundaries between forest types are nebulous, and the actual amount of carbon on any given acre depends on local climate conditions, conservation efforts, logging history and more.

California’s top climate regulator, the Air Resources Board, glossed over much of this complexity in implementing the state’s program. The agency established fixed boundaries around giant regions, boiling down the carbon stored in a wide mix of tree species into simplified, regional averages.

That decision has generated tens of millions of carbon credits with dubious climate value, according to a new analysis by CarbonPlan, a San Francisco nonprofit that analyzes the scientific integrity of carbon removal efforts.
» Read article
» Read the Carbon Plan analysis

Dissecting ‘Unsettled,’ a Skeptical Physicist’s Book About Climate Science
Five statements author Steven Koonin makes that do not comport with the evidence.
By Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News
May 4, 2021

Physicist Steven Koonin, a former BP chief scientist and Obama administration energy official, seeks to downplay climate change risk in his new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters.”

His critics say he often draws general conclusions from specific slices of data or uncertainties (sometimes signaled by key words or phrases.) As a result, they say, his statements are frequently misleading, and often leave the reader with the incorrect impression climate scientists are hiding the truth.

“Identifying, quantifying, and reducing uncertainties in models and observations is an integral part of climate science,” said atmospheric scientist Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “The climate science community discusses uncertainties in an open and transparent way, and has done so for decades. It is simply untrue that Prof. Koonin is confronting climate scientists with unpleasant facts they have ignored or failed to understand.”

Scientists who have been engaged in recent climate research also believe Koonin’s critique seems out of step with what has been happening in the field. He relies on the latest statements of the consensus science, but the most recent reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out in 2013 and 2014. The IPCC’s updated assessment reports due out later this year and next year will almost certainly include recent studies that undercut Koonin’s conclusions.

Here are five statements Koonin makes in “Unsettled” that mainstream climate scientists say are misleading, incorrect or undercut by current research:
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» More about climate

CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

What You Need to Know About Solid-State Batteries
This next jump in battery-tech could solve a lot of EV problems.
By Chris Teague, Autoweek
April 30, 2021

The world of the internal combustion engine will sadly, but very necessarily, come to a close at some point in many of our lifetimes. Hybrids and electric vehicles are becoming more affordable and more advanced at a rapid pace, which means batteries are taking the place of fossil fuels. This has led to an equally rapid progression in battery technology, with the main goals of improving capacity, charging times, and safety. One major advancement in this field is the advent of solid-state batteries, which promise to push the boundaries of the limitations that current lithium-ion batteries carry.

Solid-state batteries, as the name suggests, do away with the heavy liquid electrolyte that lives inside lithium-ion batteries. The replacement is a solid electrolyte, which can come in the form of a glass, ceramics, or other materials. The overall structure of a solid-state battery is quite similar to that of traditional lithium-ion batteries otherwise, but without the need for a liquid, the batteries can be much denser and compact. Without diving too deeply into their inner workings, solid-state batteries expend energy and recharge much in the same way as traditional lithium-ion units do.

Beyond the rare potential for causing a fire, the liquid electrolytes inside lithium-ion batteries aren’t particularly great at longevity. Over time, compounds in the liquid can corrode internal battery components and can experience degradation or solid material build up inside, both of which lead to a degradation of battery capacity and overall performance.

Solid-state batteries are, for now, still in development. Toyota aims to sell its first EV powered by a solid-state battery before 2030, while several other automakers are working in partnership with battery produces on their own projects. Notably, Volkswagen is working in partnership with QuantumScape, a California-based company that hopes to push its batteries into commercial use by 2024.
» Read article

Study: Synthetic fuels cost more money and cause more CO2 emissions vs. batteries
By Stephen Edelstein, Green Car Reports
May 4, 2021

As buzz around synthetic fuels builds, the Europe-focused environmental group Transport & Environment (T&E) cautions that vehicles burning these supposedly greener fuels may cause more carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions than battery-powered vehicles, and cost more as well.

That’s the conclusion T&E voiced in a position paper asking regulators not to include synthetic fuels (sometimes referred to as “e-fuels”) in the upcoming Euro 7 framework for emissions rules in the European Union.

As some automakers begin to experiment with the technology, T&E said synthetic fuels shouldn’t qualify for emissions-reduction credits under future regulations, calling the environmental benefits of these fuels “a mirage.”

By 2030, an electric car charged from the electricity grid will produce 40% lower CO2 emissions than a gasoline car burning synthetic fuel, according to the paper. Furthermore, the amount of electricity used to power an EV is lower than the amount needed to produce synthetic fuel, so electric cars do better on emissions even with a dirtier grid mix than synthetic-fueled cars, the paper said.

Synthetic fuel will also be more expensive for both automakers and drivers, T&E said.
» Read article

» More about clean transportation

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

Leaked docs: Gas industry secretly fights electrification
By Benjamin Storrow, E&E News
May 3, 2021

In public, Eversource Energy likes to tout its carbon neutrality goals and its investments in offshore wind.

But officials from New England’s largest utility struck a different tone during an industry presentation in mid-March. Instead of advocating for lower emissions, company officials outlined a defensive strategy for preserving the use of natural gas for years to come.

Natural gas is “in for [the] fight of it’s life,” said one slide presented at the meeting and obtained by E&E News. It also called for a lobbying campaign, saying that “everyone needs to contact legislators in favor of NG.” Another slide asked how the industry could “take advantage of power outage fear” to bolster gas’s fortunes.

Eversource is identified in the presentation materials as the co-leader of a national “Consortium to Combat Electrification,” run out of the Energy Solutions Center, a trade group based in Washington. The slides identified 14 other utilities involved in the effort and said the group’s mission was to “create effective, customizable marketing materials to fight the electrification/anti-natural gas movement.”

The presentation comes amid a rising tide of policies aimed at banning natural gas in buildings.

Eversource executives sought to distance themselves from the messages conveyed in the presentation, saying they don’t reflect the views of the utility’s leadership. Yet the company’s private assessment, delivered to industry insiders, underscores the challenge facing gas providers as state and federal policymakers set their sights on net-zero emissions targets.
» Read article

Eversource’s New CEO Talks Future of Natural Gas
By Emily Hayes, RTO Insider
April 30, 2021

As Joe Nolan prepares to take on the role of Eversource Energy’s chief executive on May 5, he is facing the challenge of transitioning New England’s largest utility to be carbon neutral in operations –— and potentially, carbon neutral for its customers.

He has worked for the utility for 35 years, and 25 of those years were spent growing Eversource’s renewable energy portfolio. He is leading the utility’s joint venture with Danish offshore wind company Ørsted to start building three wind farms in the Northeast. Nolan will take over the CEO position from Jim Judge.

Nolan, 58, told NetZero Insider he wants to double down on achieving carbon neutrality for Eversource’s buildings and vehicle fleets as CEO.

But Massachusetts, one of the states Eversource operates in, recently passed comprehensive climate legislation that includes a legally binding commitment to reduce the state’s carbon emissions to 50% below 1990 levels by 2030. President Biden’s proposal to cut emissions in half by 2030 only strengthens state mandates like Massachusetts’s new climate laws.

Yet the utility plans to spend billions of dollars upgrading pipes that distribute natural gas, and ratepayers will be responsible for covering the cost. The utility is also in the process of renewing three contracts with natural gas supply companies.

The plans clash with the goals of the state’s new climate law, as well as the new climate-driven mission statement for the state’s Department of Public Utilities. But new orders that specify how to wean utilities off fossil fuels are needed before agencies enforcement can happen.

Energy experts like Amy Boyd, director of policy at the Acadia Center, say that the money utilities put into natural gas systems is “buried money and stranded costs” that will fall on low-income and environmental justice communities without the same access to renewable energy options. As a result, those communities will experience higher utility rates.

From a physics perspective, it is “always more thermodynamically effective to just use electricity directly,” Boyd added.

Hydrogen molecules are also smaller than methane. If methane is leaking in the existing natural gas pipe system, then hydrogen will surely leak as well.
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» More about fossil fuels

BIOMASS

Construction deal reached for $15m Massachusetts biomass project
By Power Engineering International
May 3, 2021

US-based energy company Clean Energy Technologies has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Ashfield Agricultural Commission (Ashfield Ag Resources) for the development of a biomass renewable energy processing facility in Massachusetts.

The MoU enables the two parties to co-develop the $15 million project. Clean Energy Technologies (CETY) will provide its high temperature ablative fast pyrolysis reactor (HTAP Biomass Reactor). Ashfield Ag Resources has provided the energy company with the rights to feedstock and site control.

The HTAP Biomass Reactor is a ‘unique’ and proprietary process that transforms organic forest waste by using ultra-high temperatures and produces renewable electrical power, BioChar fertilizer and high heating value fuel gas in addition to other commercially valuable chemicals.

The parties agreed in principle to the critical components which are expected to annually deliver up to 14,600MWh of renewable electricity and 1,500 tons of BioChar by Q1 2022.

Clean Energy Technologies also plans to secure additional biomass resources to deliver additional projects ten times larger in the future. (emphasis added)

Kam Mahdi, CEO of CETY, said “This project is the first of four anticipated renewable biomass projects, and is expected to serve as a model for developing new projects to capture market share in this highly profitable and growing industry. By vertically integrating the biomass projects into our business, we are also able to grow our heat recovery business horizontally. We hope that our future projects will be large by orders of magnitude and have a profound impact on the environment while bringing us new sources of income.”
» Read article
» Read press release
» Read some of the backstory: Plant to power Ashfield lumber biz draws ire, By Richie Davis, Daily Hampshire Gazette, June 24, 2018