Weekly News Check-In 6/10/22

Welcome back.

A case that took six years to move through the courts finally concluded this week when the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the U.S. Department of the Interior must analyze the climate impacts of oil and gas leasing on 4 million acres of federal land spanning five states before drilling can commence. This comes after the oil and gas industry failed to strike down three separate settlements arising out of lawsuits brought against the DoI by U.S. conservation groups.

In a surprising twist, Massachusetts may become the first state to pass legislation reversing a national trend in which states open their electricity markets to competition. But studies show that retail electric suppliers have generally offered plans that turn out to be more expensive for consumers than default rates from utilities.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s first-ever senior counsel for environmental justice and equity, Montina Cole, has stated that the commission can “absolutely” improve its assessments of natural gas projects to better account for environmental justice issues. We’re looking forward to seeing how this translates into action. FERC recently declared that the Weymouth compressor station should never have been permitted, but then declined to actually do anything about this unhealthy and dangerous facility located within an environmental justice community.

On a related topic, we offer an interview with one of the authors of a new paper arguing that policies focused only on greenhouse gas emissions will be less successful than a broader approach that tackles inequality and climate change together. Turns out that climate change increases inequality – something we already knew – but inequality also makes climate change worse and more difficult to address.

In climate news, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just surpassed anything seen on Earth in the past four million years. There’s also new research saying we have greater than a 50% chance of locking in global warming of more than 1.5°C unless greenhouse gas emissions can be dramatically reduced before 2025.

That certainly lays down a challenge, so we’re happy to report that the Biden Administration this week took executive action, invoking the Defense Production Act to build up domestic production of all sorts of clean energy products including solar panels, electric transformers, heat pumps, insulation and hydrogen-related equipment. At the same time, we found a cautionary article about hydrogen, calling attention to several chemical pathways by which it could become another powerful greenhouse gas if leaked into the atmosphere. The message: limit hydrogen to applications for which there are no alternatives, and stop hyping it as the answer to all-things-energy.

The European Commission is responding to Russian energy blackmail associated with its war in Ukraine by proposing to end sales of fossil fuel boilers by 2029. That will boost the energy efficiency of building heat by encouraging a more rapid adoption of heat pumps and district geothermal networks, but experts are saying the timeline should be more ambitious.

Out west, Wyoming is preparing to bump coal off its position as the state’s top energy revenue earner, through grid modernization in the form of two major high-voltage transmission lines connecting itself to several other states in the West. The Gateway South and TransWest Express transmission lines will allow a major expansion of wind energy development.

The road to clean transportation isn’t always smooth. Two Massachusetts state senators are calling out the Baker administration for broken electric vehicle chargers along the Mass Turnpike – two of six having been inoperable for over a year. But in the ‘win’ column, Colorado-based Solid Power just took a major step toward realization of its solid state EV battery with completion of its pilot production line. This is necessary to prove production capability at commercial scale, and also allows the long testing and safety certification process to begin.

We have a couple of articles on how some electric utilities have worked behind the scenes to undermine progress toward clean energy, and even to promote climate denial. But regulations are changing to make that harder. In others cases, courts are coming for the worst offenders in the same way they’re going after fossil fuel producers who internally acknowledge climate risk while telling a different story to investors and the public.

We’ve known for a long time about health risks associated with natural gas infrastructure, but it’s difficult to monitor how pollutants move through the air at the local level. A recent innovative study in a heavily fracked Ohio county showed that regional air quality monitors failed to capture short-term neighborhood-level variations in pollution that affect people’s health. But low-cost local monitors revealed the true story.

Wrapping up the energy news, a huge spike in the cost of fossil fuels is driving worldwide inflation. Natural gas futures hit a 13-year high ahead of what traders expect to be a very hot summer. This sort of price volatility is a risk associated with energy derived from fuels traded on global commodity markets. Renewable energy and energy storage are technology-based and therefore tend to experience price reductions over time.

The last word goes to another fossil-derived product: single-use plastics, which the Biden administration just committed to phasing out in all U.S. public lands including national parks. Once fully implemented, it will cut 80,000 tons from the Department of the Interior’s annual waste stream.

  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

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

Judge: U.S. Must Conduct Climate Review Of Leases Before Drilling Can Commence
By Julianne Geiger, Oil Price
June 3, 2022

The U.S. Department of the Interior must analyze the climate impacts of oil and gas leasing on 4 million acres of federal land spanning five states before drilling can commence, a legal settlement reached this week concluded, according to Reuters.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruling comes after oil and gas industry groups failed to succeed with their motion to strike down three separate settlements arising out of lawsuits brought against the DoI by U.S. conservation groups.

This week’s settlement is just the latest in the six-years-long saga that started when conservation groups WELC and WildEarth Guardians sued the Department of the Interior over millions of federal acres that were leased to oil and gas companies in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

Years ago—well before the Biden Administration took office, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras blocked drilling permits and required the DoI to do a more thorough environmental analysis that included GHG emissions. Today confirms that ruling despite oil and gas industry challenges.

The Biden Administration must now conduct a more thorough environmental review of those leases. For Biden, this is a precarious position indeed, particularly in the runup to mid-term elections. On the one hand, the U.S. President has taken heavy criticism for his energy policies in the wake of record-high gasoline prices. On the other, he has taken heavy criticism from his green supporters for his failure to live up to some of his anti-fossil fuel campaign promises.
» Read article       

» More about protests and actions

LEGISLATION

Massachusetts lawmakers consider ending retail electric choice for residential customers
By Iulia Gheorghiu, Utility Dive
June 8, 2022

At least 18 states have opened up their electricity markets to competition. Arizona backed away from plans to allow retail choice in the early 2000s in the face of the Western energy crisis, but no states have reversed course so far after allowing it, retail choice advocates say. Massachusetts, which opened its retail electricity market to competition in 1998, could be the first, after studies and support from the Office of the Attorney General showed retail electric supplier offers as generally being more expensive than the default utility supply offer.

The state legislature has considered this issue in the House of Representatives since 2018, as the AG reported higher costs for customers who left municipal or investor-owned utility service. Healey’s testimony on S. 2150 last summer noted that arrears increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that residents were being charged more by electric suppliers in nearly every community examined.

“I know it is a big deal for us to call for the banning of an industry,” Healey told the state Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, but “this industry has overcharged Massachusetts customers for far too long.”

However, the 2021 study is “riddled with inaccurate results,” creating an unrealistic picture for state legislator support of eliminating retail choice for residential customers, Christopher Ercoli, president of the Retail Energy Advancement League, said in an interview with Utility Dive.

According to REAL, retail suppliers lock rates in at the beginning of a contract, so many retail energy customers in Massachusetts that are locked into rates from last fall are currently saving money as energy prices are currently increasing in the country and internationally.
» Read article      

» More about legislation

FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

FERC’s EJ counsel says agency can bolster gas oversight
By Miranda Willson, E&E News
June 2, 2022

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can “absolutely” improve its assessments of natural gas projects to better account for environmental justice issues, according to the agency’s first-ever senior counsel for environmental justice and equity.

One year into her role at FERC, Montina Cole joined a webinar yesterday to discuss how the commission is becoming more responsive to historically disadvantaged communities affected by its decisions and policies — something that environmental justice advocates say has long been overlooked.

Cole said FERC is planning to build staff capacity focused on justice and equity in natural gas proceedings, as well as hold a public workshop on environmental justice issues “that are arising in the gas facility review process.” A FERC spokesperson said the timing on the public workshop has not been determined.

“I’m very, very optimistic and looking forward to ways that we can improve [gas permitting],” Cole said during the webinar, hosted by the Wires Group, a trade association for the electric transmission industry.

[…] Earlier this year, FERC proposed changes to its guidelines for assessing new natural gas pipelines, calling for “robust consideration” of projects’ effects on environmental justice communities as part of a costs and benefit analysis. In its updated permitting policy, the majority of commissioners said that FERC would try to more accurately identify disadvantaged communities. They also said the commission would consider a new pipeline’s cumulative impacts — meaning the total burdens or benefits that affected communities could experience from the facility and other infrastructure in the area.

Critics, however, said the new policy went too far on environmental and landowner issues and would make it difficult and expensive for new gas projects to get built. In March, FERC turned the proposal and another, related policy into “drafts,” open to further consideration and revisions (Energywire, March 25).

While Cole did not directly address that controversy, she said she is reviewing the commission’s “key regulations and guidance” for the siting of new natural gas projects. That effort will include consideration of projects’ cumulative impacts and the “thresholds” currently used by FERC to identify environmental justice communities, Cole said.
» Read article       

» More about FERC

GREENING THE ECONOMY

Q&A: The Causal Relationship Between Inequality and Climate Change
DeSmog interviewed an author of a new paper that says that policies focused only on greenhouse gas emissions will be less successful than a broader approach that tackles inequality and climate change together.
By Nick Cunningham, DeSmog Blog
June 3, 2022

Climate change has worsened global inequality, with poorer countries less able to withstand and adapt to climate change’s effects. It also has worsened inequality within countries between the rich and the poor: The impacts of drought, floods, hurricanes, and extreme heat are disproportionately felt by low-income communities and communities of color.

But new research suggests the reverse is also true: Not only is climate change contributing to greater inequality, but inequality is also fueling climate change. A new peer-reviewed paper by Fergus Green and Noel Healy, published in One Earth, analyzes the various ways in which inequality contributes to more greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously making climate action even more difficult to pursue. The paper also asserts that climate policies that only focus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, while ignoring inequality, will prove less effective at addressing the climate crisis compared to a much broader movement — like the Green New Deal — that attacks both inequality and climate change at the same time.

DeSmog spoke with one of the authors, Fergus Green, a lecturer in political theory and public policy at University College London, about the new research. The following conversation was edited for brevity and clarity.
» Read article      
» Read the paper

Inside Ithaca’s plan to electrify 6,000 buildings and grow a regional green workforce using private equity funds
The city has mustered $105 million in private funds to support low-cost loans for businesses and residents to install heat pumps.
By Robert Walton, Utility Dive
June 2, 2022

Ithaca, New York, made headlines last year when its city council voted to fully decarbonize. Achieving the 2030 goal will require grid decarbonization, electrifying transportation and rolling out heat pumps to the city’s 6,000 aging commercial and residential buildings.

Ithaca is known for its progressive politics — in the 90s the city pioneered a time-based currency to inspire local spending, for example. But the decarbonization plan is among its most ambitious efforts, according to Director of Sustainability Luis Aguirre-Torres.

“When I came to Ithaca last year … my job was to craft a plan to decarbonize in eight years. I told the mayor, ‘You’re nuts. This is very difficult to achieve,’” said Aguirre-Torres, who took the job in April 2021.

Ithaca’s plan is “innovative,” Building Decarbonization Coalition Executive Director Panama Bartholomy said, and is an example of the kind of work many cities are now exploring.

“It’s encouraging to see a city take a wholesale approach to buildings instead of trying to adopt policies that are more reactive,” Bartholomy said. “Every major city in the United States right now is trying to figure out the right model for how to do this.”

Installing heat pumps and making other efficiency improvements makes financial sense for some buildings: the energy savings will pay for the improvements. Other projects may be close, or simply not pencil out. Either way, the savings accrue slowly. So in order to get all buildings decarbonized, the city aggregated blocks of buildings to manage project risk, and then securitized the project to attract private capital.

“The numbers work for some [buildings], they don’t work for some. But in the end, as a whole, it works for the investor,” Aguirre-Torres said. The program is essentially a way of covering the upfront costs of making building improvements and turning it into “electrification as a service,” he explained, resulting in long-term leasing or long-term lending at a low interest.
» Read article       

» More about greening the economy

CLIMATE

“Limited time:” World will lock in 1.5°C warming by 2025 without big emissions cuts
By Michael Mazengarb, Renew Economy
June 7, 2022

The world faces a greater than 50 per cent chance of locking in global warming of more than 1.5°C  unless greenhouse gas emissions can be dramatically reduced before 2025, new research suggests.

In a new paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, warn that the world needs an ‘abrupt cessation’ of greenhouse gas emissions to prevent locking in global warming above safe levels.

The research also confirm that net zero targets by 2050 are insufficient to cap average global warming  below 2°C, and that does not include like feedback loops that will accelerate temperature rises.

“Gobal warming is projected to exceed 1.5°C within decades and 2°C by mid-century in all but the lowest emission scenarios, the paper says. “That is, there is limited time and allowable carbon dioxide emissions (a remaining carbon budget) before these temperature thresholds are exceeded.”

The research, led by oceanography researcher Michele Dvorak, used geophysical modelling that finds the world already has a 42 per cent chance of exceeding 1.5°C of global warming – even if further greenhouse gas emissions were immediately ceased.

The probability of breaching this and higher temperature levels will increase year-on-year, the research shows, until the world achieves a status of zero net emissions.
» Read article       

Carbon Dioxide Levels Are Highest in Human History
Humans pumped 36 billion tons of the planet-warming gas into the atmosphere in 2021, more than in any previous year. It comes from burning oil, gas and coal.
By Henry Fountain, New York Times
June 3, 2022

The amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke a record in May, continuing its relentless climb, scientists said Friday. It is now 50 percent higher than the preindustrial average, before humans began the widespread burning of oil, gas and coal in the late 19th century.

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any time in at least 4 million years, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said.

The concentration of the gas reached nearly 421 parts per million in May, the peak for the year, as power plants, vehicles, farms and other sources around the world continued to pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Emissions totaled 36.3 billion tons in 2021, the highest level in history.

As the amount of carbon dioxide increases, the planet keeps warming, with effects like increased flooding, more extreme heat, drought and worsening wildfires that are already being experienced by millions of people worldwide. Average global temperatures are now about 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than in preindustrial times.

Growing carbon dioxide levels are more evidence that countries have made little progress toward the goal set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic effects of climate change increases significantly.
» Read article       

» More about climate

CLEAN ENERGY

Biden invokes Defense Production Act to boost domestic manufacturing in clean energy, grid sectors
By Ethan Howland, Utility Dive
June 7, 2022

The U.S. Department of Energy aims to build up domestic production of solar panels, electric transformers, heat pumps, insulation and hydrogen-related equipment under the Defense Production Act, or DPA, determinations issued Monday by the White House.

The DOE could support those sectors through commitments to buy clean energy products from U.S. manufacturers; direct investments in facilities; and aid for clean energy installations in homes, military sites and businesses, Charisma Troiano, department press secretary, said in an email.

The Biden administration’s move to use its executive power is a “game changer” that will establish and bolster a manufacturing base to support the renewable energy transition, according to Jean Su, energy justice program director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The DPA, which President Joe Biden has invoked to spur COVID-19 vaccine and electric battery production, allows the White House to coordinate with industry to obtain supplies that are deemed to be in the interest of national defense, according to Su.

The White House issued similar DPA determinations for the solar, hydrogen, heat pump, insulation and grid equipment sectors.

“Ensuring a robust, resilient, and sustainable domestic industrial base to meet the requirements of the clean energy economy is essential to our national security, a resilient energy sector, and the preservation of domestic critical infrastructure,” Biden said in the findings.

The Center for Biological Diversity in February urged Biden to use his executive powers, including through the DPA, to tackle climate change.
» Read article       

Hydrogen Leaks Could Make Climate Change Worse, Scientists Warn
By The Energy Mix
June 5, 2022

As the world invests billions in hydrogen fuel systems, scientists are urging vigilance against leakage, since its release into open air can trigger chemical reactions that significantly warm the atmosphere.

Widely seen as one of the only ways to decarbonize sectors that aren’t easily electrified (like heavy industry and aviation), hydrogen has much to recommend it as a clean fuel—unless it leaks into the air, where three chemical pathways can transform it into an indirect greenhouse gas with 33 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over 20 years, writes Bloomberg.

The first pathway involves hydrogen’s tendency to react with atmospheric hydroxyl (OH), an element which also reacts with methane in a manner that helps remove this dangerous greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. The more hydrogen that leaks into the atmosphere, the less hydroxyl will be available to neutralize the warming effects of methane, which is about 85 times more powerful a warming agent than CO2 over a 20-year span.

The second pathway is hydrogen’s involvement, near ground level, in a chemical chain reaction that produces ozone, another potent greenhouse gas.

Finally, leaked hydrogen that makes it into the stratosphere produces more water vapour, “which has the overall effect of trapping more thermal energy in the atmosphere.”

Most leaked hydrogen would not escape into the air, but would rather be absorbed by microbes in the soil. But any hydrogen that does get airborne can wreak climate havoc, at least in the short term.

And it’s the short term that matters, given the speed with which global temperatures are rising, say climate scientists with the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

“The potency is a lot stronger than people realize,” EDF climate scientist Ilissa Ocko told Bloomberg. “We’re putting this on everyone’s radar now, not to say ‘no’ to hydrogen, but to think about how we deploy it.”
» Read article       

» More about clean energy

ENERGY EFFICIENCY

  

Ditching gas boilers for heat pumps will take EU “well beyond next winter”
To quit Russian gas, the European Commission now wants to end sales of fossil fuel boilers by 2029. Some experts are pinning new hopes on geothermal heat pumps.
By Nour Ghantous, Energy Monitor
June 3, 2022

As part of its REPowerEU proposal to end Russian fossil fuel imports, the European Commission announced an increase in its energy efficiency target for 2030 from 9% to 13% on 18 May 2022. Part of achieving this ambition will be to double the roll-out of heat pumps, with a view to banning gas boilers by 2029, and integrating geothermal and solar thermal energy in modernised district and communal heating systems.

The move is a win for energy efficiency campaigners who argue that the best way to reduce energy imports is to reduce our energy demands in the first place. “A structural reduction of energy demand must be at the core of any strategy to increase EU energy security,” said Arianna Vitali Roscini, secretary-general of the Coalition for Energy Savings, in a statement about the plans. She suggests that the Commission’s inclusion of energy efficiency targets in its proposal will ensure long-term solutions to the energy crisis: “REPowerEU [proposes] measures that go well beyond next winter only.”

The general response in the EU energy sphere has been a sigh of relief at seeing more robust energy efficiency policies proposed, but no festivities just yet as some argue the plans still fall short of necessary ambition.

“We are very happy to see a phase-out date [for gas boilers] but we are not happy with the date itself,” says Davide Sabbadin, senior policy officer for climate and circular economy at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a network of environmental NGOs.
» Read article       

St. Paul school is latest to conclude geothermal is ‘the way to go’
Space constraints, energy savings and the long-term return on investment convinced St. Paul Public Schools to install a ground-source geothermal heat pump system at a high school that until now hasn’t had a cooling system.
By Frank Jossi, Energy News Network
June 7, 2022

[…] In St. Paul, only about a third of public schools have air conditioning — a growing liability as heat waves become more common, resulting in potentially distracting or dangerous temperatures in classrooms. The district also has a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from its buildings by 45% by 2030.

Johnson High School, in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood on the city’s East Side, is among the sites that have lacked cooling options. Its 1961 facade and interior were refreshed a few years ago but its HVAC system is decades old.

Space constraints limited the school’s options. While geothermal systems can require a large underground footprint, relatively little equipment is installed above ground, which along with financial aspects made it a good option.

“Geothermal seemed the way to go,” said Henry Jerome, facilities project manager.

The school district hired a local firm, TKDA, to consult on the project. Over the spring, the district hired a contractor to bore 160 wells 305 feet deep into the school’s baseball field. A liquid glycol mixture will run through buried pipes, transferring heat between the ground and the school’s heat pump.

The school won’t be able to entirely depend on geothermal during the coldest stretches of winter. A high-efficiency condensing boiler and two steam boilers will remain in operation when temperatures drop below freezing, but the school expects to cut natural gas consumption by more than half.

[…] Geothermal can cost more upfront than conventional heating and cooling systems and require enough land for well drilling. But the economics can appeal to schools, governments, and other building owners with long-term outlooks. After installation, the systems require a relatively small amount of electricity to operate.

Peter Lindstrom, a manager for Minnesota’s Clean Energy Resource Teams, specializes in helping public sector organizations with clean energy projects. He said geothermal is getting more attention recently as public schools and other institutions aim to reduce emissions and energy costs. Other Minnesota schools that have installed geothermal systems include Pelham, Onamia, and Watertown-Mayer Schools. And it may not be the last in St. Paul.
» Read article    

» More about energy efficiency

MODERNIZING THE GRID

Greenlit powerlines forecast Wyoming wind energy boom
Developers are poised to double Wyoming’s wind energy capacity, replacing coal as the state’s top source of electrical generation.
By Dustin Bleizeffer, WyoFile, in Energy News Network
June 3, 2022

Having recently cleared key legal and permitting hurdles, developers are slated to begin construction of two major high-voltage transmission lines connecting Wyoming to several states in the West. When completed, the Gateway South and TransWest Express transmission lines will open the door to a major expansion of wind energy development in the Cowboy State, industry officials say.

“The TransWest Express project opens the ability for Wyoming wholesale electricity supplies to reach new markets, like southern California, Arizona and Nevada, that the state is not directly serving today,” Power Company of Wyoming Communications Director Kara Choquette said.

The $3 billion, 732-mile long TransWest Express transmission line will transport electricity from Power Company of Wyoming’s Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project in south-central Wyoming, as well as other potential new wind energy facilities. Situated in Carbon County, the project’s 900 wind turbines with a total capacity of 3,000 megawatts will be the largest onshore wind energy facility in the United States.
» Read article       

» More about modernizing the grid

CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

Senators blast Baker administration over broken EV chargers on Mass. Pike
By Aaron Pressman, Boston Globe
June 7, 2022

Two state senators are taking the Baker administration to task for broken electric vehicle chargers along the Massachusetts Turnpike.

As the Globe reported in April, two of the six chargers installed at rest stops along the 138-mile highway — in Natick and the westbound Charlton stop — have been out of service for over a year. EVgo, the company that operated the chargers, withdrew all six charger locations from its listings and said it could not repair the problems on its own.

On Monday, in a letter to Secretary of Transportation Jamey Tesler, state senators Cynthia Creem and Michael Barrett demanded that the broken chargers be fixed by July 1 and asked for information about who was responsible for their operation and maintenance.

“The continued inoperability of these chargers hampers the Commonwealth’s ability to reach its EV goals, not only because it makes it more difficult for EV drivers to travel across the Commonwealth, but also because it feeds into an inaccurate yet prevalent narrative that EVs are not reliable for long-distance travel,” the pair wrote to Tesler.

MassDOT did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We would like to see the broken EV chargers on the Pike returned to operation by no later than July 1 of this year, ahead of the busiest periods of summer travel,” the senators added. “We would also like to know that there is a plan in place to ensure that future issues with chargers are resolved immediately.”

The chargers were first installed in 2017. Matthew Beaton, then-secretary of energy and environmental affairs, said they would give “consumers confidence that they will have access to charging stations on long trips, a commonly cited hurdle in transitioning to zero emission vehicles.”
» Read article       

Solid-state batteries for EVs move a step closer to production
Solid Power wants to give cells to BMW and Ford for testing later this year.
By Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica
June 6, 2022

Solid Power, a Colorado-based battery developer, moved one step closer to producing solid-state batteries for electric vehicles on Monday. The company has completed an automated “EV cell pilot line” with the capacity to make around 15,000 cells per year, which will be used first by Solid Power and then by its OEM partners for testing.

“The installation of this EV cell pilot line will allow us to produce EV-scale cells suitable for initiating the formal automotive qualification process. Over the coming quarters, we will work to bring the EV cell pilot line up to its full operational capability and look forward to delivering EV-scale all-solid-state cells to our partners later this year,” said Solid Power CEO Doug Campbell.

Solid-state batteries differ from the lithium-ion batteries currently used in EVs in that they replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid layer between the anode and cathode. It’s an attractive technology for multiple reasons: Solid-state cells should have a higher energy density, they should be able to charge more quickly, and they should be safer, as they’re nonflammable (which should further reduce the pack density and weight, as it will need less-robust protection).

It’s one of those technologies that to a very casual observer is perennially five years away, but in Europe there are already operational Mercedes-Benz eCitaro buses with solid-state packs.
» Read article       

» More about clean transportation  

ELECTRIC UTILITIES

Meet the group lobbying against climate regulations — using your utility bill
The federal government is considering a rule change that would make it harder for utility companies to recover trade association dues.
By Nick Tabor, Grist
June 7, 2022

A typical electricity bill leaves the customer with the sense that she knows exactly what she’s paying for. It might show how many kilowatts of power her household has used, the costs of generating that electricity and delivering it, and the amount that goes to taxes. But these bills can hide as much as they reveal: They don’t indicate how much of the customer’s money is being used to build new power plants, for example, or to pay the CEO’s salary. They also don’t show how much of the bill goes toward political activity — things like lobbying expenses, or litigation against pollution controls.

Most U.S. utility bills also fail to specify that they’re collecting dues payments for trade associations. These organizations try to shape laws in electric and gas companies’ favor, in addition to more quotidian functions like coordinating regulatory compliance. On any given billing statement, these charges may only add up to pennies. By collecting them from tens of millions of households, however, trade associations have built up enormous budgets that translate to powerful political operations.

The Edison Electric Institute, an association that counts all of the country’s investor-owned electric utilities as its members, is the power industry’s main representative before Congress. With an annual budget of over $90 million, Edison is perhaps the largest beneficiary of the dues-collection baked into utility bills. In recent years, it’s attracted attention for its national campaign against rooftop solar panels, and for its role in the legal fight against the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.

Within the next year or two, however, this financial model could come to an end. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the top government agency overseeing the utility industry, is considering a rule change that would make it harder for companies to recover these costs. While utilities are already nominally barred from passing lobbying costs along to their customers, consumer advocates and environmental groups argue that much trade association activity that isn’t technically “lobbying” under the IRS’s definition is still political in nature — and that households are being unfairly charged for it.
» Read article       

Warned of ‘massive’ climate-led extinction, Southern Company funded crisis denial ads
The Georgia-based utility spent at least $62.1 million running campaigns to deceive the public about climate change, new research has found.
By Geoff Dembicki, The Guardian
June 8, 2022
» Read article       

» More about electric utilities

HEALTH RISKS – NATURAL GAS INFRASTRUCTURE

In Ohio, researchers find EPA data doesn’t tell the whole story on fracking pollution
Scientists working with community organizations established a network of local-level air monitors, finding details that regional monitors can miss.
By Kathiann M. Kowalski, Energy News Network
June 8, 2022

A recent study in a heavily fracked Ohio county found that regional air quality monitors failed to capture variations in pollution at the local level, spotlighting the need to address gaps in data on fossil fuel emissions.

Existing Environmental Protection Agency monitors track broad regional trends in air quality. But they don’t reflect differences from place to place within an area. And their reporting often misses short-term spikes that can affect human health, said lead study author Garima Raheja at Columbia University.

“Health is not a broad regional effect,” Raheja said. Health impacts from pollution often depend on more local conditions and can vary “day to day, hour to hour,” she noted.

[…] The team developed a grassroots, community-based network of low-cost air monitoring stations. Each monitoring station used PurpleAir monitors. The monitors cost a couple hundred dollars each, compared to up to $100,000 or more for equipment at the regional EPA air monitoring stations, Raheja said.

The equipment measures levels of fine particulate matter, or PM. Corrected data from PurpleAir monitors correlate strongly with those from reference-grade monitors, studies have found. Tweaks to the monitors also let the network track levels of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. And community members kept logs about physical symptoms or things they noticed in the area.

Additionally, the researchers made an inventory of all pollution emissions already permitted for the area. The data let them model how pollution could travel in the area.

“We wanted to show what people are actually experiencing,” Raheja said. “And we wanted to show some examples of plumes from different sources.”

General trends in emissions levels were similar for the EPA monitoring stations and the local monitors. However, there were substantial variations in the emissions levels recorded by the two types of stations. Those results showed that exposure to pollutants varies throughout the study area.

The results also showed multiple cases when spikes in certain emissions tracked closely with log entries about residents’ health symptoms or other events in the area, such as pipeline pigging or compressor station blowdowns.
» Read article     
» Read the study

» More about gas infrastructure health risks

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

Natural Gas Futures Hit 13-Year High As Traders Expect “Blistering Hot Summer”
By Tom Kool, Oil Price
June 6, 2022

On Monday, Henry Hub natural gas futures were up nearly 10% at a 13-year high.

At 5:00pm EST, Henry Hub prices for July contracts sat at $9.368, up 9.91%. August contracts were at $9.350, up 9.87%.

A key reason for the sudden surge is heat, with temperatures expected to rise significantly in the middle part of this month, with production declining and demand threatening to exceed supply.

Natural Gas Intelligence (NGI) quoted EBW analyst Eli Rubin as saying in a note to clients that a “blistering hot summer” is first and foremost among fears. Rubin said the increasing demand for natural gas for cooling in the coming weeks “could ignite another substantial rally in Nymex futures into mid-summer”.

Texas, in particular, is expected to see demand for natural gas soar to a historical record this week–even before the hottest part of summer sets in.

Also driving natural gas futures upward is rising demand, declining production, and soaring exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the U.S. Gulf coast, diverting domestic supplies.
» Read article       

» More about fossil fuel

PLASTICS BANS

US government to ban single-use plastic in national parks
Biden officials make announcement on World Oceans Day in effort to stem huge tide of pollution from plastic bottles and packaging
By Oliver Milman, The Guardian
June 8, 2022
» Read article      

» More about plastics bans

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Weekly News Check-In 5/27/22

Welcome back.

We’re leading this week with an appreciative nod to individuals whose personal actions or protests either clarify an issue or make real change happen. However it’s done, it takes courage and for that we are grateful and inspired. We have articles about a senior safety consultant who quit working with Shell over what she calls the oil giant’s “extreme harms” to the environment. Also, take a look at the winners of this year’s prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

In that same spirit, lots of our friends were out on the Water Street Bridge between Peabody and Danvers yesterday, in a “mass action” demonstration to further their opposition to a new gas/oil peaker plant being built off Peabody’s Pulaski Street. Ironically, the permits allowing the plant’s construction could not have been granted under current law.

While we’re talking about effective activism, keep in mind that it’s not always employed for the planet’s benefit…. In the U.S., Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in and punish companies that dare to divest from fossil fuels. This information lands at about the same time as a new study showing just how invested many of us are through pension and other funds, and to what extent these assets are at risk in a crash-the-economy sort of way.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Agency is also feeling this “opposing forces” dynamic. Last year, the head of the FERC delivered a message to the energy industry saying FERC’s Office of Enforcement would ensure energy and power companies comply with the agency’s rules. The number of investigations and the size of fines has since picked up considerably. But gas pipeline developers are striking back, bringing legal action through conservative-leaning courts that seek to undermine FERC’s core ability to regulate industry.

Meanwhile, UN secretary general António Guterres addressed thousands of graduates at Seton Hall University in New York state, telling them not to take up careers with the “climate wreckers” – companies that drive the extraction of fossil fuels. It’s a serious message, since building a green economy is a project we largely left to these young people. That, and a mountain of student debt….

Recent climate research clarifies the scope and scale of our global decarbonization effort. We now have a better understanding of the urgency surrounding elimination of potent, short-term warming drivers like methane and other pollutants. Researchers describe it as having to “win the sprint to slow warming in the near term by tackling the short-lived climate pollutants, so that we can stay in the race to win the marathon against CO2.” Without effective action against those short-term gases, a reduction in CO2 emissions would actually make warming worse for a while. Some related good news: Geneva, Switzerland-based International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) recently voted unanimously to approve a proposed update to a household appliance safety standard which will allow air conditioners and heat pumps used around the world to use new hydrocarbon refrigerants that have a negligible climate impact.

In clean energy, researchers have shown that double-sided panels help offset the effects of snow on ground-mounted solar arrays, mostly due to the snow’s reflective nature. And in clean transportation, the race to bring solid state batteries to the next generation of electric vehicles is running hot among all the major auto manufacturers – but nobody’s quite cracked it yet.

We’ll wrap up this optimistic section with a note that New England’s grid operator, ISO-NE, recently published a study that lays out four possible frameworks for how the grid operator might integrate clean energy into the grid. It’s long-overdue, but a step in the right direction.

Let’s turn to a report that details the PR and lobbying blitz from fossil fuel companies in the early days of the Russian invasion that aimed to benefit oil and gas interests while offering little for the current crisis. According to Faye Holder, program manager for InfluenceMap. “The sector has quickly mobilized around the war in Ukraine and high gas prices to promote the need for more ‘American-made energy,’ often relying on potentially misleading or questionable claims.”

Not wanting to miss an opportunity, Canada’s top energy official said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is open to accelerating a liquefied natural gas project that could start supplying Europe in as soon as three years. See “misleading or questionable claims”, above.

Last week, we ran a couple articles that described the worrisome growth of the biomass industry in Japan and South Korea. Europe has been the other big proponent, but now it seems like the EU is finally ready to stop subsidizing this polluting, destructive, false climate solution. Big decision coming in September – we’ll be watching.

And circling back to South Korea, it’s made some progress with plastics recycling programs. This article offers an interesting description of what an organized society can accomplish through highly focused education and enforcement mechanisms. But it’s also a reminder that really, folks, the answer is to use much less plastic to begin with!

  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

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

Meet the 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners
By Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
May 25, 2022

A teenage girl in California who shut down a toxic oil-drilling site; a Nigerian lawyer who got long-overdue justice for communities devastated by two Shell pipeline spills; two Indigenous Ecuadorians who protected their ancestral lands from gold mining. These are just some of the inspiring winners of this year’s so-called “Green Nobel Prize.”

The Goldman Environmental Foundation today announced the seven 2022 winners of its annual Goldman Environmental Prize, which is the highest honor one can receive for participating in grassroots environmental activism.

“While the many challenges before us can feel daunting, and at times make us lose faith, these seven leaders give us a reason for hope and remind us what can be accomplished in the face of adversity,” Goldman Environmental Foundation vice president Jennifer Goldman Wallis said in a press release. “The Prize winners show us that nature has the amazing capability to regenerate if given the opportunity. Let us all feel inspired to channel their victories into regenerating our own spirit and act to protect our planet for future generations.”
» Read article    

» More about protests and actions

PEAKING POWER PLANTS

‘We’re not giving up:’ Protestors, neighbors rally near Peabody peaker plant site
By Hadley Barndollar, USA TODAY NETWORK, in Milford Daily News
May 26, 2022

PEABODY — Jerry Halberstadt has asthma, and lives about a mile from a new fossil fuel-fired peaking power plant that’s being built.

He’s very conscious of air quality because of his diagnosis, he said. “This stuff can stop me in my tracks. There’s an impact from the burning of fossil fuels.”

But more than anything, Halberstadt worries for his three grandchildren, and “the nastiness that awaits them.”

In a “mass action” demonstration with speakers, bikers, kayakers and even kites, protestors converged on the Water Street bridge between Peabody and Danvers on Thursday to further their opposition to a new peaker plant being built off Peabody’s Pulaksi Street, where two power plants already exist on a riverfront site.

The new plant, which has received all necessary approvals from the state and been green-lighted for construction, would be located within an environmental justice neighborhood, a state designation given to areas where residents are historically vulnerable to environmental hazards.

State laws passed since the Peabody plant’s permitting process aim to vet projects as such and protect these very communities from fallout. Protestors on Thursday indicated they’re ramping up efforts to stop the plant.

[…] The situation in Peabody has taken center stage for climate activists in Massachusetts, which by law is now required to cut its emissions in half by 2030, and then reach net zero by 2050. Opponents feel building a natural gas and oil-fired power plant at this stage in the game is completely contradictory to those efforts.

Judith Black, a Marblehead resident and member of 350 Mass, said the peaker “flies in the face of environmental justice goals and our climate roadmap bill.”
» Read article     

» More about peaker plants

DIVESTMENT

How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action
Legislators and their allies are running an aggressive campaign that uses public money and the law to pressure businesses they say are pushing “woke” causes.
By David Gelles and Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times
May 27, 2022

In West Virginia, the state treasurer has pulled money from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, because the Wall Street firm has flagged climate change as an economic risk.

In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels. Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.

And officials in Utah and Idaho have assailed a major ratings agency for considering environmental risks and other factors, in addition to the balance sheet, when assessing states’ creditworthiness.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.

“We’re an energy state, and energy accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue for us,” said Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer. “All of our jobs come from coal and gas. I mean, this is who we are. This is part of our way of life here in the state. And they’re telling us that these industries are bad.”

“We have an existential threat here,” Mr. Moore said. “We have to fight back.”

In doing so, Mr. Moore and others have pushed climate change from the scientific realm into the political battles already raging over topics like voting rights, abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In recent months, conservatives have moved beyond tough words and used legislative and financial leverage to pressure the private sector to drop climate action and any other causes they label as “woke.”

“There is a coordinated effort to chill corporate engagement on these issues,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares, chief executive of the Leadership Now Project, a nonprofit organization that wants corporations to address threats to democracy. “And it is an effective campaign. Companies are starting to go into hiding.”

The pushback has been spearheaded by a group of Republican state officials that has reached out to financial organizations, facilitated media appearances and threatened to punish companies that, among other things, divest from fossil fuels.
» Read article    

» More about divestment

FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

FERC enforcement ramp-up spurs pipeline wars
By Miranda Willson andMike Soraghan, E&E News
May 25, 2022

Last year, the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission delivered a message to the energy industry: “The cop is back on the street.”

Chair Richard Glick was referring to FERC’s Office of Enforcement, which seeks to ensure energy and power companies comply with the independent agency’s rules. Last fiscal year, the office opened 12 new investigations compared to six the previous year.

The uptick in cases includes a new focus on energy infrastructure, including the country’s pipelines — and how companies handle their construction and operation. The bottom line, Glick said, is that pipeline companies must abide by the conditions in the permits that FERC issues.

“The message is you’ve got to live up to your commitments,” Glick told reporters in December. “If you don’t do that, we’re going to come down on you, because that’s our role.”

But as the agency seeks to penalize pipelines for permit violations — including pursuing record-setting fines — developers are hitting back with legal challenges that, if successful, could chip away at the commission’s enforcement powers. That in turn could make it more difficult to penalize companies for spills, groundwater contamination and failure to restore the land they trench through to build the lines.

Since Congress boosted FERC’s enforcement authority in 2005, the Office of Enforcement has not typically gone after pipeline violations, focusing more on wrongdoing in energy and power markets. But that has recently begun to change, some legal experts said.

Glick’s leadership has undoubtedly spurred FERC to increase oversight on pipelines, said Carolyn Elefant, a former FERC attorney who now represents landowners affected by pipelines. Before the Democrat was tapped by President Joe Biden to serve as FERC chair last January, “pipeline stuff was completely below the radar,” she said.

Now, FERC is accusing two multibillion-dollar pipeline developers of failing to abide by the conditions and standards they agreed to when they were granted permits. In one case, the enforcement office is proposing its biggest-ever fines in a pipeline construction case.

Increased enforcement from FERC may send a message to the natural gas industry that the agency is prepared to hold developers accountable for the terms and conditions included in their permits, said Carrie Mobley, an associate at the law firm McGuireWoods LLP.
» Blog editor’s note: This good news is tempered by the fact that the gas industry and conservative judges are moving to dampen FERC’s regulatory powers. Stay tuned.
» Read article      

FERC’s Glick says he’s ‘bullish’ on energy storage, aims to prioritize regulations for hybrid projects
By Iulia Gheorghiu, Utility Dive
May 18, 2022

Amid other regulatory priorities, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Richard Glick would have the agency look into energy storage participation in wholesale markets via hybrid projects with wind and solar, he said on Tuesday during the CLEANPOWER 2022 conference in San Antonio, Texas.

He noted that while FERC requires grid operators to facilitate storage participation in wholesale markets, the effort does not address the role of co-located storage with other generation. Glick, and other speakers at the conference, credited FERC for having “knocked down some of the barriers” for storage and distributed resource participation.

“Storage provides really an enormous amount of potential benefits that we’re not fully utilizing,” he told attendees. “We need to address the variability [on the grid] and where we need more flexible generation resources.”

Already there are a number of dockets open at FERC that are tangential to the role of energy storage, including a requirement for plans from regional transmission organizations, or RTOs, to contend with increasing power variability as more intermittent resources are connected to the grid.

“A couple of weeks ago, we issued an order requiring the RTOs around the country to report to us what their plans are for addressing … additional variability on the system. I’m very bullish about storage’s ability to play a great role in that,” Glick said.

Currently, energy storage plays a larger role in California than in other wholesale markets, as the independent system operator deals with a lot of high variability on the grid due to the large amounts of solar power, experts on an energy storage panel said at CLEANPOWER on Tuesday.

In order for energy storage to increase its participation in other wholesale markets, there needs to be a greater recognition of the resource’s resiliency capacities, experts said at the conference.
» Read article      

» More about FERC

CLIMATE

New Study Says World Must Cut Short-Lived Climate Pollutants as Well as Carbon Dioxide to Meet Paris Agreement Goals
Cutting only CO2 emissions, but failing to rein in methane, HFCs and soot, will speed global warming in the coming decades and only slow it later this century.
By Phil McKenna, Inside Climate News
May 23, 2022

Climate policies that rely on decarbonization alone are not enough to hold atmospheric warming below 2 degrees Celsius and, rather than curbing climate change, would fuel additional warming in the near term, a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes. The study found that limiting warming in coming decades as well as longer term requires policies that focus not only on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, but also of “short-lived climate pollutants”—greenhouse gases including methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)—along with black carbon, or soot.

“We’re simultaneously in two races to avert climate catastrophe,” said Gabrielle Dreyfus, chief scientist for the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development and lead author of the study.  “We have to win the sprint to slow warming in the near term by tackling the short-lived climate pollutants, so that we can stay in the race to win the marathon against CO2.”

The study used climate models to assess how the planet would respond if countries addressed climate change solely through decarbonization efforts—namely transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy—without reining in methane and other short-lived but potent climate pollutants.

The authors found that decarbonization-only efforts would actually result in increased warming over the near term. This is because burning fossil fuels emits both carbon dioxide and sulfates. Unlike carbon dioxide, which warms the planet and remains in the atmosphere for centuries, sulfate particles reflect sunlight back into space but only remain in the atmosphere for several days, so they have a powerful, but short-lived cooling effect.

The continual release of sulfates through the ongoing burning of fossil fuels currently offsets roughly half a degree of warming that the planet would otherwise experience from the carbon dioxide emissions of fossil fuel combustion, Dreyfus said. Transitioning to renewable energy will quickly remove the short-term curb on warming provided by sulfate emissions, and the planet will continue to heat up for a couple of decades before the longer-term cooling from cutting carbon dioxide emissions takes hold, she added.

If, however, emissions of methane, HFCs, soot and nitrous oxide occur at the same time as decarbonization, both near-term and long-term warming can be reduced, Dreyfus said.
» Read article    
» Read the study

Greenhouse Gases Trapped Nearly 50% More Heat Last Year Than in 1990: NOAA
“Getting hot in here,” said one climate campaigner. “Gotta get congressmen and senators to do more midday outdoor events in their dark suits.”
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
May 23, 2022

An annual assessment released Monday by a U.S. agency underscored the need to dramatically cut planet-warming pollution with a notable revelation about heat-trapping gases over the past three decades.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution from human activities trapped 49% more heat in the atmosphere in 2021 than in 1990, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NOAA announced that finding in its update of the Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), which converts the warming influence of carbon dioxide—or CO2, the most common GHG—as well as methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and 16 other chemicals into one number that can be compared to previous years, as the agency explained in a statement.

“The AGGI tells us the rate at which we are driving global warming,” said Ariel Stein, acting director of NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML).

“Our measurements show the primary gases responsible for climate change continue rising rapidly, even as the damage caused by climate change becomes more and more clear,” she added. “The scientific conclusion that humans are responsible for their increase is irrefutable.”

Echoing other experts and reports—including recent publications from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—NOAA scientists on Monday urged humanity to reduce GHGs.
» Read article      

» More about climate

CLEAN ENERGY

Think Solar Panels Don’t Work in Snow? New Research Says Otherwise
Double-sided panels help offset the effects of snow on solar arrays.
By Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News
May 26, 2022

Skeptics of renewable energy often claim—usually with an eye roll—that solar power doesn’t work well in snowy climates.

When most solar panels were stationary and one-sided, this idea carried some weight. But now, most panels move on an axis to follow the sun throughout the day, and an increasing share of panels have silicon on the front and back, making solar more effective even in places with regular snowfall.

Here’s the latest: A recent paper led by researchers at Western University in London, Ontario shows that the use of “bifacial” photovoltaic panels—solar panels that take in sunlight from both sides—produces substantially more electricity during winter compared to using one-sided panels, based on data from a solar array that has both kinds of panels.

“I was surprised how striking the results were,” said Joshua Pearce, an electrical engineering professor at Western University and co-author of the paper. “There is no question now that bifacial modules are the way to go for ground-mounted PV systems in the north.”

The paper, published in the journal Renewable Energy, shows that double-sided panels can take in substantial amounts of energy from light reflected off of the snowy ground at times when the front of the panel is most likely to be partially covered by snow, as described in PV Magazine.

The researchers went to a solar array in Escanaba, a town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. They mounted cameras to observe snow cover, pyranometers to measure levels of solar radiation and also gathered electricity generation data from the system’s operator.

During the cold-weather months of November 2020 to March 2021, the one-sided panels experienced a snow-related energy loss of 33 percent, while the two-sided panels had a loss of 16 percent. The study period included 30 days in which there was snowfall.

Most of the gains for the two-sided panels were because of the reason the researchers expected, which is that sunlight reflected off of the snowy ground and hit the back side of the panels.
» Read article     
» Obtain the study

As blades get longer, Charlestown testing center seeks to expand
Wind turbine technology moving faster than expected
By Shira Schoenberg, CommonWealth Magazine
May 22, 2022

WHEN THE WIND Technology Testing Center in Charlestown was built in 2011, the longest wind turbine blades in the world were around 65 meters long, or 215 feet. So the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center constructed the blade testing building to be 90 meters long, around 300 feet – about the size of a football field.

“We built this assuming that blades were going to get larger, and so 85 to 90 meters seemed like a reasonable length to expect at the time,” said Robert FitzPatrick, director of government affairs for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. At that length, the testing center was the largest of its kind in North America.

Fast forward a decade, and General Electric wanted to test its newest blade – a 107-meter-long behemoth that will be used in its Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The testing center had to cut part of the blade off to fit it in the building. While blades can be tested without the tip, it is not ideal, and engineers need to account for the adjusted weight.

Massachusetts Clean Energy Center CEO Jennifer Daloisio said the facility was built with the knowledge that it would eventually have to be expanded, but the technology advanced faster than expected. “Essentially, the facility needs to be almost doubled in length and doubled in height to accommodate the wind blades of both the current and the future projects,” Daloisio said.

The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center is working on plans to expand the center, lengthening it to be able to accommodate 140 or 150-meter blades. The center would grow from around 300 feet long to 500 feet long, while nearly doubling the height in the new section, from 85 feet to 155 feet tall. The expansion would not let the center test more blades – it would keep the same three testing stations – but it would adapt the center to the size of the more modern turbines.
» Read article      

» More about clean energy   

ENERGY EFFICIENCY

International Commission Votes to Allow Use of More Climate-Friendly Refrigerants in AC and Heat Pumps
The new guidelines could save the equivalent of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, but the U.S. could prove slow to adopt them.
By Phil McKenna, Inside Climate News
May 22, 2022

A secretive vote in the arcane and Byzantine world of international safety standards late last month may lead to a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from home heating and cooling systems in the coming years.

In a closed-door process that concluded on April 29, two dozen technical experts from around the world voted unanimously to approve a proposed update to a household appliance safety standard set by the Geneva, Switzerland-based International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The IEC sets safety standards for thousands of household appliances. The international standard serves as a guideline for country-specific safety standards such as UL, formerly Underwriters Laboratories, safety standard in the U.S. Details about the subcommittees that shape the safety standards are typically kept confidential. IEC declined to provide additional information about the vote, including the names of individual country representatives who approved the update.

The update, a draft copy of which IEC shared with Inside Climate News and which IEC plans to publish next month, could help solve a significant climate problem that has long bedeviled manufacturers of air conditioners and high efficiency electric heating systems known as heat pumps, which wanted to use more climate-friendly refrigerants but were prevented from doing so.

The vast majority of air conditioners and heat pumps used around the world today rely on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), synthetic chemical refrigerants that, when leaked into the atmosphere, are highly potent greenhouse gases. The approved safety standard update will allow appliance manufacturers to instead use hydrocarbon refrigerants that have a negligible climate impact.

[…] Most air conditioners and heat pumps in the United States today rely on HFC-410a, a chemical refrigerant that is 4,260 times as potent as carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere over a 20-year period.
» Read article     

» More about energy efficiency     

 

MODERNIZING THE GRID

Study lays out options for New England grid operator to help cut emissions
Critics say the regional grid operator has been slow to respond to states’ emission reduction goals, and that reforms are needed to help emerging clean energy resources compete in its electricity markets.
By Sarah Shemkus, Energy News Network
May 23, 2022

The regional electric grid operator for New England is beginning to study how it could play a new role in cutting power sector emissions.

ISO New England oversees the electric grid for the six-state region, coordinating the real-time flow of electricity as well as operating longer-term markets to make sure an adequate supply of generation is being built.

Traditionally, as with other regional grid operators, its top concerns have been reliability and affordability: making sure it always has enough power to keep the lights on at the lowest possible price.

In recent years, though, many states have adopted a third priority: reducing emissions. Critics say grid operators have been slow to respond, and that their policies have become barriers to states’ climate goals by prioritizing conventional power plants over emerging clean energy resources.

ISO-NE’s recent Pathways study, released in February, lays out four possible frameworks for how the grid operator might integrate clean energy into the grid. They include continuing the status quo, creating a new clean energy market, implementing carbon pricing, and a hybrid scenario.

Advocates say the report is a pivotal — if long overdue — step toward decarbonizing the region’s power supply.

“To date, the ISO’s market designs have been holding back the region,” said Melissa Birchard, director of clean energy and grid reform at environmental advocacy group the Acadia Center. “This study is a first step to changing that.”
» Read article    
» Read the Pathways study

‘More, more, more’: Biden’s clean grid hinges on power lines
By Peter Behr, E&E News
May 23, 2022

With its signature climate legislation roadblocked in Congress, the Biden administration is seeking an unprecedented expansion of high-voltage electric lines to open new paths to wind and solar energy.

“We obviously need more, more, more transmission to run on 100 percent clean energy … and handle all the buildings and the cars and the trucks that we’re working to electrify,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in February.

For example, 80,000 megawatts of new wind farms could be built on open lands in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas, the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) noted at a DOE webinar in March. But today, there’s only enough existing high-voltage transmission to export one-tenth of that amount, according to ESIG, a nonprofit organization of grid experts.

The gap highlights a major challenge for President Joe Biden’s goal to decarbonize the grid by 2035. In response, DOE has started to roll out a range of proposals under its $16 billion Building a Better Grid initiative announced in January, hoping to break through layers of obstacles to transmission.

In an interview with E&E News, Patricia Hoffman, principal deputy assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Electricity, described a two-track strategy: Decisions beginning this year offer financial backing to help get “shovel ready” power line projects under construction quickly, and a multiyear planning operation seeks state officials’ support for new interregional power lines connecting large wind and solar regions with population centers.

DOE invited suggestions this month on how to structure the shorter-term initiative. It will contract to purchase up to half the electricity on new power lines up to a total commitment of $2.5 billion, aiming to get previously announced projects across the starting line to construction.

“We hope that we can expand the program in 2023 with some of the other authorities we have,” Hoffman said. DOE would resell the power to utilities, replenishing the funding pool, under the plan.
» Read article      

» More about modernizing the grid

CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

Inside the race for a car battery that charges fast — and won’t catch fire
Amid rising gas prices and climate change, car giants are in a fierce contest to perfect the solid-state battery, long viewed as a ‘holy grail’ for electric vehicles
By Pranshu Verma, Washington Post
May 18, 2022

In September, Toyota offered the world a glimpse into the company’s future. In an 11-second YouTube video, it displayed a modern four-door car cruising down a test track. The most important upgrade was the tagline emblazoned on the car’s right side: “Powered By All-Solid-State Battery.”

In recent years, car giants such as Toyota, Ford and Volkswagen have been trying to overcome the shortcomings of batteries that power electric vehicles by racing to produce a next-generation battery . Many companies are rallying around solid-state batteries, which do not contain liquid electrolytes and can charge quicker, last longer and be less prone to catching fire than the lithium-ion batteries currently in use, according to battery experts. Automakers have poured millions into perfecting the technology by the latter half of the decade.

The contest comes at a crucial time. Gas prices have skyrocketed, and climate change has accelerated efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, increasing demand for electric vehicles. This has led to shortages of many minerals used in current electric-vehicle batteries, amid ethical concerns as they’re often mined by adults and children in backbreaking conditions with little protection.

But experts and carmakers say getting the new batteries to market is an extremely challenging task.

“It’s the technology of the future,” said Eric D. Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute. “The question is: How soon is that future going to be here?”
» Read article     

» More about clean transportation

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

Oil and Gas Industry Seized on War in Ukraine to Water Down Climate Policy, Report Shows
A new report details the PR and lobbying blitz from fossil fuel companies in the early days of the Russian invasion that aimed at benefiting oil and gas interests, while offering little for the current crisis.
By Nick Cunningham, DeSmog Blog
May 24, 2022

While Russia dropped missiles on Kyiv and laid siege to the port of Mariupol in late February, the oil and gas industry took advantage of the war in Ukraine to spread misinformation about the causes of the energy crisis in order to apply political pressure and pursue a longstanding wish list of policy changes, according to new research.

Energy prices soared in the aftermath of the Russian invasion. In response, the oil and gas industry waged a concerted influence campaign that blamed the Biden administration’s climate policies for undermining American energy independence and for causing a spike in prices, according to a report from InfluenceMap, a corporate watchdog group. Across an array of platforms, the industry and its allies framed more drilling and looser regulation as a solution to these problems, and advocated for policies that had tenuous connections to the global energy crisis but were nonetheless favorable to the fossil fuel industry.

“The U.S. oil and gas sector has consistently argued for policies that allow for new or increased fossil fuel exploration, and against policies that would reduce demand. But what’s changed in recent months is the intensity of that message,” said Faye Holder, program manager for InfluenceMap. “The sector has quickly mobilized around the war in Ukraine and high gas prices to promote the need for more ‘American-made energy,’ often relying on potentially misleading or questionable claims.”

DeSmog previously reported on oil executives’ and lobbyists’ PR blitz in the days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a move which sought to take advantage of the crisis to secure largely unrelated policy victories. But InfluenceMap’s new study offers a deeper and more comprehensive examination of how the industry attempted to influence public opinion.
» Read article      

U.S. Can’t Drill Its Way to Energy Security, Jenkins Warns
By The Energy Mix
May 19, 2022

The war in Ukraine is increasing gasoline prices in America despite the country’s status as the world’s largest oil producer, demonstrating why the United States “cannot drill its way to energy security” and should instead invest in renewables, writes Princeton University energy specialist Jesse Jenkins.

“Oil, coal and, increasingly, natural gas are globally traded commodities, which leaves the U.S. economy dangerously exposed to the vagaries and volatility of energy prices. The decisions of a single autocrat on the other side of the world can send the cost of filling the tank in Des Moines or Denver soaring,” writes Jenkins, an assistant professor of energy systems engineering and policy at Princeton University and leader of the REPEAT Project.

Drilling for more oil could have strengthened the country’s energy security the last time Americans were paying this much for gas, back in 2008. At that time, the U.S. imported more than half of its oil, while renewable energy sources were much more costly and supplied less than 2% of the country’s electricity.

But the energy landscape has fundamentally changed since then, after national oil and gas production outpaced consumption and the cost of renewable energy and lithium-ion batteries plunged.

But while he agrees the U.S. should continue to export oil and gas to European allies to help “starve the Kremlin war effort,” Jenkins says the country’s energy security depends on developing a new approach that expands renewable energy infrastructure. The energy provisions in the now-stalled Build Back Better bill would reduce U.S. consumption of oil by nearly 500 million barrels and natural gas by two trillion cubic feet per year, for combined annual savings of about US$70 billion for American homes and businesses.

Those reductions would also make the U.S. economy far more energy secure and help the country meet its national emissions-reduction targets.
» Read article     

» More about fossil fuels

LIQUEFIED NATURAL GAS

Energy Chief Says Canada Could Send Gas to Europe Within 3 Years
Trudeau minister eyes conversion of existing Repsol facility. But nation currently lacks export terminal on Atlantic coast.
By Brian Platt, Bloomberg
May 26, 2022

Canada’s top energy official said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is open to accelerating a liquefied natural gas project that could start supplying Europe in as soon as three years.

Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told Bloomberg News the fastest way to help “our European friends” would be for Spain’s Repsol SA to convert an existing LNG import facility in New Brunswick, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, into an export terminal.

“A lot of existing infrastructure is there,” Wilkinson said Wednesday in a telephone interview from Berlin, ahead of a Group of Seven energy ministers meeting. If Repsol decided to convert the terminal, “you likely could have a facility that would be producing within three to four years,” he said.

[…] Wilkinson said Canada would be looking for two things in any new LNG facility: that it use a low-emission process for gas and that it be capable of transitioning to exporting hydrogen later on.
» Read article     

» More about LNG

BIOMASS

EU Parliament’s Environment Committee urges scale back of biomass burning
By Justin Catanoso, Mongabay
May 18, 2022

In a surprising and unprecedented vote this week, the European Parliament’s Environment Committee recommended the scaling back of the EU’s existing subsidies incentivizing the burning of wood pellets, replacing coal for heat and energy. The committee also urged the European Union to reduce how much it counts forest biomass toward the continent’s renewable energy goals.

Forest advocates are viewing the move with both hope and skepticism.

If approved and written into policy in September as part of the EU’s revised Renewable Energy Directive (RED), the recommendations would be the first steps of any kind toward slowing the accelerating use of biomass burning over the past 12 years, which scientists have long argued adds to carbon emissions, damages forests, and diminishes biodiversity.

“We are relieved to see a majority of the Environment Committee opt for a biomass limitation for energy and heat,” Fenna Swart of The Netherlands’ Clean Air Committee told Mongabay. “But there are still significant gaps in the law that the European Parliament must close during the plenary vote in September. Otherwise, compliance will backfire at the expense of forests, as is now happening on a large scale.”

The committee put forward four recommendations cautiously cheered by forest advocates like Swart — forest biomass opponents who have generated widespread public opposition to the practice across Europe, but who have yet to see any policy reform. The committee recommended that:

• A definition for primary woody biomass, or biomass sourced directly from whole trees, be added to RED for the first time, with the intention of protecting intact forests. Exemptions would include forests affected by fire, pests and disease.
• Primary woody biomass no longer qualify as counting toward member states’ renewable energy targets. Currently, biomass accounts for 60% of the EU’s renewable energy portfolio, far more than zero-carbon wind and solar.
• Primary woody biomass no longer receive subsidies under RED, with certain exemptions.
• Where whole trees are harvested, they should first be used for long-lasting wood products and only burned for energy as wood pellets if no other usage options exist.

Wood-pellet industry representatives, who are only accustomed to government support, were not happy with the recommendations.
» Read article     

» More about biomass

PLASTICS RECYCLING

In South Korea, an Emphasis on Recycling Yields Results
Ambitious goals, messaging and enforcement put the nation at the top of the sustainability pack, serving as a model as the World Economic Forum pushes to end plastic waste.
By David Belcher, New York Times
May 21, 2022

[…] South Korea, which is the size of Portugal, but with a population of nearly 52 million — while surrounded by water on three sides and a hostile neighbor to the north — is like much of the rest of the planet: under pressure to better utilize existing resources, and to do so before it is too late.

That sense of urgency, and a United Nations effort to reach an international agreement by 2024 to eliminate plastic waste, may well be on many minds at the Davos summit this year as the ecological fallout from the pandemic becomes clear.

“One of the things the pandemic revealed was a rise in the use of plastic for food deliveries and a sense of safety with extra packaging all over the world,” said Kristin Hughes, the director of resource circularity at the World Economic Forum. “Recycling was put on hold in many countries. It wasn’t deemed as essential.”

Now that the crisis phase of the pandemic has passed, she said, it’s time to switch direction. “We need to move away from the take-use-dispose approach,” she said.

The challenge of consumption and disposal is evident across South Korea. A train ride through this country reveals patches of crammed houses, businesses and farms. There’s little room for landfills. In fact, one of the largest in the country, which absorbs much of the waste from Seoul and its 10 million residents, is expected to be full by 2025.

South Korea is also a major manufacturer, exporting electronics, cars and appliances at breakneck speed, which keeps it hovering in or near the top 10 countries for G.D.P. This has created the need for factories and shipyards, in an already crowded nation that has scant room to accommodate them.

So recycling bins and food waste canisters are ubiquitous, and 32-gallon food-recycling containers line the curbs of Seoul much the way cars pack the roads in the capital’s notorious traffic.

At the Recycling Management factory on a recent afternoon, dozens of workers in protective gear stood alongside jolting conveyor belts, sorting and positioning thousands of plastic bottles and sending them on to their second or third life.
» Read article      

» More about plastics recycling

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Weekly News Check-In 5/7/21

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.
» Read article               

» 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
» Read article               

» 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:
» Read article               

» 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.
» Read article         

» 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

» More about biomass              

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Weekly News Check-In 4/30/21

Welcome back.

First, a quick note that the Weymouth compressor station is attempting another startup, following three emergency shut-downs with large natural gas releases – all within the first eight months of operation. Efforts continue to shutter the facility permanently. A story with similar plot lines is gathering momentum a little farther north, where six-year-old plans to build a nat-gas peaking power plant at Peabody Municipal Light Plant’s Waters River electrical substation is finally getting a public hearing – and an earful from folks who complain that plans have progressed without appropriate public disclosure and comment. If constructed, the plant would be instantly obsolete relative to battery storage, a liability against Massachusetts’ aggressive emissions reduction goals, and a potentially expensive stranded asset on Peabody MLP’s books.

Other New England nat-gas infrastructure projects are attracting protests, with considerable activity focused on the proposed Killingly, CT generating plant.

Democratic leaders in 16 states and the District of Columbia have moved to support Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s fight to shut down Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline where it crosses the environmentally-sensitive Straits of Mackinac. They submitted an amicus brief in U.S. district court, arguing that jurisdiction in this case belongs at the state – not federal – level. 

In support of the fossil fuel divestment movement, we posted a story aimed at college students, describing how to get your institution to commit. And a related article reporting that student divestment organizers from all eight Ivy League colleges have joined forces to define timelines and acceptable levels of divestment.

Some fossil fuel workers are already finding good jobs in the green economy. Oil workers from the Gulf coast are applying their specialized skills to the booming offshore wind energy sector, set to employ thousands.

An upcoming UN climate report will stress the critical importance of quickly reigning in methane emissions. While methane enters the atmosphere from many sources – both natural and industrial – the oil and gas industry is a major emitter that can significantly reduce its methane emissions by implementing better practices. To that end, the fossil fuel industry may welcome the recent U.S. Senate vote to reinstate methane rules dropped by the Trump administration. Now legitimate operators can’t be undercut by those who reduce costs by allowing excessive emissions during extraction and transport.

It’s easy to sign up for a clean energy plan from electricity suppliers who simply buy enough renewable energy credits to cover their needs. But the electrons powering their customers’ appliances may still be produced in local fossil fuel plants. It’s much harder to commit to sourcing “24/7 clean electricity”, which requires the use of actual renewable energy electrons – and the Biden administration just put the federal government on course to do that.

We have updates on energy storage technologies, and we take the long view on clean transportation, looking at the future of carbon-free ships and electric aircraft, including an important article from last year describing the engineering breakthrough that opens the path to reliable, affordable, solid-state EV batteries.

This week’s wrap-up includes a helpful piece explaining how woody biomass sourced from American forests became the “zero-emissions” fuel of choice in European power plants. And early research indicates that bacteria might be useful in removing some microplastics from the aquatic environment.

  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

 

WEYMOUTH COMPRESSOR STATION

Compressor station coming back online after April 6 shutdown
By Jessica Trufant, The Patriot Ledger
April 27, 2021

WEYMOUTH — The energy company that owns the natural gas compressor station on the banks of the Fore River plans to start the facility back up, several weeks after the third unplanned gas release at the site since September. 

Enbridge, the Canadian-based energy company that built the compressor station, notified the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection this week that it may vent gas from the facility between April 29 and May 5 while it brings it back into service.

Enbridge spokesman Max Bergeron said in an email that the process will take a few days and involve ” controlled venting of natural gas through a stack specifically designed” for venting.

“We are planning to use advanced specialized equipment to minimize the volume of natural gas vented into the atmosphere,” he said. “In order to ensure awareness, we have notified state and local officials of these activities. We are proceeding with public health and safety as our priority.”

The compressor station is part of Enbridge’s Atlantic Bridge project, which expands the company’s natural gas pipelines from New Jersey into Canada. Since the station was proposed in 2015, residents have argued it presents serious health and safety risks.

On April 6, the compressor unit had an issue and shut off to prevent equipment damage, Bergeron said. The facility then vented natural gas, which Enbridge was required to report to MassDEP. Bergeron said Enbridge has [resolved] the issue.
» Read article                 

» More about the Weymouth compressor          

PEAKING POWER PLANTS

Residents, officials speak out against plant
By Erin Nolan, The Salem News
April 27, 2021

PEABODY — For Mireille Bejjani, the Department of Public Utilities hearing on Monday morning felt like the first time Peabody and other North Shore residents could voice their concerns about plans to build a 60-megawatt gas-powered plant in the city.

“A lot of folks said this morning this process has been marked by a lack of transparency and public engagement,” said Bejjani, a community organizer for Community Action Works, a nonprofit that works with communities to prevent and clean up pollution. The group has been holding community meetings to educate people about the proposal. 

“This hearing, while there were members of the public able to attend and speak, that does not correct all those years where the public wasn’t included,” Bejjani said, “and there is a lot more work to be done in order to make this a fully transparent process.”

At the hearing, more than 20 people — including several local and state officials — spoke against Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company’s years-old plan to build a gas peaking power plant at the Peabody Municipal Light Plant’s Waters River substation, behind the Pulaski Street industrial park.
» Read article                 

» More about peaking power plants          

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

As New England Wind Power Grows, Local Activists Try To Halt Natural Gas Projects
By J.D. Allen & Patrick Skahill, NHPR
April 21, 2021

The fight against fossil fuel expansion in New England has a new front in Killingly, Connecticut. Climate activists want the state to reject a proposed natural gas plant there, which is tied to the company behind a controversial pipeline development currently underway in Minnesota and a recently completed natural gas line in New England.

Connecticut’s activists say construction of new climate-warming infrastructure like this is out of step with the clean energy goals of most New England’s governors and President Joe Biden.

This month, a group of climate activists went door-to-door to banks in New Haven, Connecticut, to tell management to divest from energy projects that contribute to greenhouse gas pollution.

Melinda Tuhus, a long-time climate activist, and the group made stops at TD Bank, Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo, all banks that have provided financial support to the energy company Enbridge, which is currently working to upgrade a 1,000-mile pipeline and have it carry tar sands oil from Canada across Indigenous land in Minnesota to a crude oil transportation hub on Lake Superior.

“People haven’t been sitting down — doing incredibly creative, courageous and non-violent civil disobedience and halting construction for various periods of time,” Tuhus said.

To activists, the danger — in addition to the destruction of tribal territory — is that the breakdown of sands oil into gasoline releases up to three times the carbon emissions of crude oil.
» Read article                 

» More about protests and actions           

 

PIPELINES

17 state leaders join Michigan’s plea for state sovereignty in Line 5 battle
By Beth LeBlanc, The Detroit News
April 23, 2021

Democratic leaders in 16 states and the District of Columbia have taken Michigan’s side in its fight to have a state court, not a federal judge, decide whether the state has the authority to shutter Enbridge’s Line 5 oil pipeline in the Straits of Mackinac.

The states submitted an amicus brief earlier this month, arguing that federal courts don’t have the jurisdiction to rule on disputes over state property rights even if the pipeline alleged to be in violation of those property rights is federally regulated.

Attorney General Dana Nessel asked Ingham County Circuit Court last year to uphold Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s revocation of Enbridge’s easement in the Straits of Mackinac as well as her order to shutter the pipeline by May 12. 

But Enbridge removed Nessel’s case to federal court, where the Canadian oil giant also sued to stop the closure on the premise that regulation of the pipeline is exclusive to federal authorities, namely the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

Nessel has asked U.S. District Judge Janet Neff to send the case back to Ingham County Circuit Court. She was joined Friday by 15 attorneys general and two governors who also believe a state court should decide the issue. 

“Despite federal safety regulations for pipelines, states are free to exercise their public trust powers to determine whether and where pipelines may cross their sovereign lands,” the states said in their filing. 

In a Friday statement, Whitmer said Enbridge’s argument that Michigan has no further say in the pipeline’s regulation after signing the 1953 easement is “absurd and antidemocratic.”

“I’m thrilled to have the support of so many other governors and attorneys general who recognize the important rights states have over the location of pipelines within their boundaries,” Whitmer said.
» Read article                 

» More about pipelines           

 

DIVESTMENT

How to get your university to divest from fossil fuels
By Siobhan Neela-Stock, Mashable
April 28, 2021

University of Michigan students know a little something about how difficult it can be to get a resistant administration to stop investing in fossil fuels.

Even convincing the school to greenlight a committee to just explore the issue was a hair-pulling hassle. In 2015, a group of University of Michigan law students tried to do just that but “basically got the middle finger from the university,” says Jonathan Morris, a University of Michigan Ph.D. student who has long been involved in divestment efforts.

It took years of demonstrating, building coalitions, and hard work, but this year that middle finger turned into a hard-won handshake. The University of Michigan has committed to discontinue its investments in fossil fuel companies and approved $140 million in renewable energy investments. 

The University of Michigan isn’t the only one to cave to student demands. Universities are divesting billions from fossil fuels because of student action. The groups behind those campaigns, which stretch across the globe from the U.S. to the UK to Australia, give similar advice if you want to encourage your university to divest too: Keep applying pressure and don’t give up.

Over half of the UK’s more than 150 universities have made some sort of divestment commitment. In the U.S., which has roughly 4,000 colleges and universities, about 60 have done the same, according to data compiled by Fossil Free, a divestment tracking project by environmental advocacy group 350.org. 

Many schools argue they won’t divest because they have a responsibility to increase income from their donations, and they are working to find climate change solutions via university research versus withholding their pocketbooks, the Associated Press reported. Some also generally contend that as investors in fossil fuel companies they can develop stakeholder sway over energy company decisions.

But J. Clarke of People & Planet, a social and environmental justice group that works with students to get UK universities to divest, sees a different motivation. 

“I think the biggest reason why universities don’t want to divest is the biggest reason why students do,” says Clarke. “It’s a political statement…  [Universities] don’t want to be seen as taking a side.”
» Read article                

All eight Ivy League student governments sign resolution calling for fossil fuel divestment
By Elizabeth Meisenzahl and Delaney Parks, The Daily Pennsylvanian
April 28, 2021

All eight Ivy League student body presidents signed a joint resolution authored by Penn’s Student Sustainability Association calling for each school to fully divest from fossil fuels.

The resolution, which also contains contributions from Penn’s Undergraduate Assembly, considers full divestment to be an end to new investments by Fiscal Year 2021, and complete divestment by Fiscal Year 2025. The resolution defines divestment as no investments in any of the top 200 fossil fuel companies; in companies that extract, process, transmit, or refine coal, oil, or gas; or in any utilities whose primary business function it is to burn fossil fuels for electricity.         

University spokesperson Stephen MacCarthy did not respond to a request for comment on whether Penn’s administration is aware of the resolution or if it plans to act on it. 

College junior and SSAP Co-Chair Vyshnavi Kosigishroff said Penn’s 2020 announcement not to invest in coal and tar sands, as well as its recent commitment to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from endowment investments by 2050, are misleading and insufficient.                

“SSAP, generally speaking, considers this announcement [of divestment by 2050] to be a lot of greenwashing, not really a commitment to anything, and really unambitious. [It] continues the narrative of Penn being really far behind our peer institutions,” Kosigishroff said.

Climate activists from SSAP and Fossil Free Penn criticized Penn’s plan for continuing to invest in fossil fuels. Penn’s plan for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 puts it on the same timeline as that of the oil company BP.    
» Read article                

» More about divestment        

 

GREENING THE ECONOMY

Gulf Coast Oil Workers Are Building America’s Offshore Wind Industry
More than a decade after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Gulf Coast oil workers are transitioning into offshore wind.
By Sara Sneath, Drilled News
April 20, 2021

“The biggest misconception about transitioning from offshore drilling to offshore wind is the idea that oil platforms can be reused to hold wind turbines,” Louisiana state Representative Joseph Orgeron said in a recent phone interview. Offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico weren’t designed to handle that sort of load. The weight distribution of an offshore wind turbine is like trying to mount a “pumpkin on a pole,” Orgeron said. 

To function, the vertical base needs to be stout enough to handle the movement of the blades spinning and the face rotating directions with the wind. 

But while offshore drilling platforms don’t quite work as offshore wind platforms, what can be repurposed are the workers and building techniques that have supported offshore oil drilling. A single offshore wind farm could employ more than 4,000 people during construction and 150 people long-term, according to a 2020 analysis by the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Rep. Orgeron didn’t start out considering the engineering difficulties of renewable energy. He grew up in the bayous of Louisiana, the homebase for his family’s business of offshore oilfield service vessels. When the oil work started to dry up, he realized that offshore wind could help his family’s company, Montco Offshore Inc, stay afloat. 

“I was fully enamored by offshore wind,” he said. “They’ll need offshore energy production expertise to do those buildouts. The people of South Louisiana would be prime to facilitate that.”

Montco was one of several Louisiana-based companies that helped build the first U.S. offshore wind farm, off the coast of Rhode Island. But exporting Louisiana knowledge gleaned from offshore drilling was just the first step. Next, Orgeron wants to see wind farms built in the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana’s governor supports the idea. Gov. John Bel Edwards asked the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to develop a plan for renewable energy production in the Gulf.

“This is not some ‘pie in the sky’ promise of economic opportunity,” Edwards said last November. “We already have an emerging offshore wind energy industry, and Louisiana’s offshore oil and gas industry has played a key role in the early development of U.S. offshore wind energy in the Atlantic Ocean.”
» Read article                 

The six ‘critical actions’ that every nation must take to reach net zero
Major report sets out practical pathways to hit carbon neutrality, including a ten-times-faster renewables build-out and ‘clear plans’ to phase out natural gas
By Leigh Collins, Recharge News
April 26, 2021

The global pace of the renewables build-out needs to increase by a factor of between five and seven by 2030 and by a factor of ten by the mid-2030s if the world is to reach net zero emissions by mid-century, says a new study by influential climate business think-tank Energy Transitions Commission* (ETC).

Power sectors in developed nations should reach near-total decarbonisation by the mid-2030s, with the use of coal eliminated “almost immediately” and clear plans to phase out unabated natural gas, according to the ETC report, Making Clean Electrification Possible: 30 Years to Electrify the Global Economy.

It adds that developing economies should commit to net-zero goals for 2060 and achieve full decarbonisation of their electricity sectors by the mid-2040s, phasing out existing coal plants in the 2030s and early 2040s.

Low-income countries, meanwhile, should aim to massively expand clean electricity provision without ever relying on fossil fuels for power generation.

The report also explains that there must be massive investment in transmission and distribution, the electrification of transport, heating and heavy industry, and the build-up of clean hydrogen — mainly green H₂ produced from renewable energy with a small proportion of blue H₂ derived from natural gas with CCS — to help decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors such as steel, shipping and aviation.

This entire energy transition will require trillions of dollars of investment, but will ultimately pay for itself, “if managed effectively”, the study says.

“These feasible objectives will only be met if countries take strong action in the 2020s, setting out both what needs to be achieved by 2030 and how they will achieve it,” it explains.
» Read article                
» Read the ETC report            

» More about greening the economy           

 

CLIMATE

Halting the Vast Release of Methane Is Critical for Climate, U.N. Says
A major United Nations report will declare that slashing emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas, is far more vital than previously thought.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times
April 24, 2021

A landmark United Nations report is expected to declare that reducing emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas, will need to play a far more vital role in warding off the worst effects of climate change.

The global methane assessment, compiled by an international team of scientists, reflects a growing recognition that the world needs to start reining in planet-warming emissions more rapidly, and that abating methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, will be critical in the short term.

It follows new data that showed that both carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere reached record highs last year, even as the coronavirus pandemic brought much of the global economy to a halt. The report also comes as a growing body of scientific evidence has shown that releases of methane from oil and gas production, one of the biggest sources of methane linked to human activity, may be larger than earlier estimates.

The report, a detailed summary of which was reviewed by The New York Times, singles out the fossil fuel industry as holding the greatest potential to cut its methane emissions at little or no cost. It also says that — unless there is significant deployment of unproven technologies capable of pulling greenhouse gases out of the air — expanding the use of natural gas is incompatible with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement.

The reason methane would be particularly valuable in the short-term fight against climate change: While methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, it is also relatively short-lived, lasting just a decade or so in the atmosphere before breaking down. That means cutting new methane emissions today, and starting to reduce methane concentrations in the atmosphere, could more quickly help the world meet its midcentury targets for fighting global warming.

By contrast, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, lasts for hundreds of years in the atmosphere. So while it remains critical to keep reducing carbon emissions, which make up the bulk of our greenhouse gas emissions, it would take until the second half of the century to see the climate effects.
» Read article                    

» More about climate             

 

CLEAN ENERGY

Why the federal government is buying into the promise of 24/7 clean power
How “24/7 clean electricity” could drive a whole new era of energy use.
By Shannon Osaka, Grist
April 21, 2021

Over the past decade, hundreds of cities, companies, and states have started buying renewable energy to power their Wi-Fi routers, run their refrigerators, and otherwise keep the lights on. The Empire State Building, for instance, is powered entirely by wind energy; the small city of Burlington, Vermont is run entirely on biomass, wind, solar, and hydropower; and the tech giant Google has been powering its data centers and office buildings with renewables since 2017. 

Or have they? Plenty of cities and companies are aiming to run on 100 percent clean energy, but it’s not exactly what it sounds like. The truth is that for the past several years, they’ve been trying to cut carbon emissions on what could be termed “Easy” mode. Yes, they buy enough renewable energy to run on clean power all the time, but that energy isn’t necessarily what’s providing the power for their air conditioners and microwaves at any given point in time. 

Now, however, some are pushing governments and companies to switch from “Easy” to “Hard.” They want to deploy something called “24/7 clean energy” — a goal that could drive a whole new phase of clean energy use. And they’ve just convinced the Biden administration to bring it to every single federal building in the United States.

[Michael Terrell, the director of energy at Google] says the benefit of 24/7 goals is that they guarantee clean power be available on the grid where the company or building operates (as opposed to thousands of miles away in Iowa) and they can boost demand for clean energy that isn’t wind or solar. In the long run, because solar and wind aren’t available all the time, electricity grids are going to need to be outfitted with “firm” power sources that can kick in at any time. That will push developers to build big batteries, nuclear reactors, geothermal plants pulling heat from under the Earth’s surface, or even natural gas plants with carbon capture capabilities. 

“When you’re thinking about sourcing energy in every location on a 24/7 basis, it really motivates you to think even more about how to get the electricity grids to carbon-free faster,” Terrell said.
» Read article                   

A battle to get more clean energy into New England’s electric grid is underway. Here’s what you need to know.
By Jan Ellen Spiegel, The CT Mirror
April 26, 2021

In January 2020, Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection — speaking to environmental advocates attending the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters annual environmental summit — leveled this broadside at the independent system operator that runs the six-state New England electricity grid and the federal authorities that govern it:

“Because of the lack of leadership on carbon at the ISO-New England, we are at the mercy of a regional capacity market that’s driving investment in more natural gas and fossil fuel power plants that we don’t want and that we don’t need,” she said. “This is forcing us to take a serious look at the costs and benefits of participating in the ISO-New England markets.”

It was widely misunderstood.

“People interpreted that as physically leaving the grid,” Dykes said a year later. “Ratepayers have gotten a lot of benefits of more reliable and affordable power by participating in a regional grid.”

What she had been talking about was a market paradigm the ISO uses to purchase power for the grid. Not much more than a year later, she is still talking about it. And with nothing short of evangelical zeal and little deference to a potentially paralyzing pandemic, Dykes has commandeered the other five New England states, the ISO, system stakeholders and more than a little national interest into a bona fide effort to figure out how to increase renewable power, decrease the use of fossil fuels and lower costs — or at least not let them go through the roof — and keep everyone on civil terms with each other.

In Connecticut, the ISO’s rules could make it difficult for the state to meet its greenhouse gas emissions goals and Gov. Ned Lamont’s executive order to have a 100% clean electric grid by 2040. And it makes the clean energy the state has already approved for development even more expensive.

The proposed Killingly natural gas plant has become the poster child for the failures of the existing system. The ISO has approved it through the [Forward Capacity Market], while those concerned about climate change — including Gov. Lamont — say it’s the wrong choice and unnecessary
» Read article                 

» More about clean energy              

 

ENERGY STORAGE

ESS Inc’s all-iron flow battery will add long-duration storage to microgrid in Patagonia, Chile
By Andy Colthorpe, Energy Storage News
April 28, 2021

ESS Inc, currently the only maker in the world of a commercially available flow battery using iron electrolytes, will deploy an energy storage system with more than six hours duration to a microgrid in Chile.

The company’s flow battery will be integrated with renewable energy in the microgrid, to help a local utility reduce its reliance on diesel generators in the unspoiled Patagonia plateau which extends across southern Argentina into Chile. ESS Inc will install a 300kW / 2MWh version of its recently-launched Energy Warehouse battery energy storage system (BESS) for the utility, Edelaysen.

Edalaysen’s grid is served by run-of-the-river hydroelectric turbines, but these vary seasonally in output and are not sufficient to meet customer demand all year round, so diesel is called into action several times a year. ESS Inc claimed that its battery’s installation as part of the renewable microgrid will enable Edelaysen, a subsidiary of Chilean utility group GRUPO SAESA, to cut three-quarters of the diesel generator use it currently runs. Work is already underway on the project and is expected to be completed later this year, with the battery storage system expected to last 25 years in operation.

“Our analysis showed that if they used lithium-ion batteries, Edelaysen could only shut down their diesel gensets for about three months per year. Instead, our long-duration iron flow storage system will reduce the need to run them by three times as much – the equivalent of nine months a year. That’s a huge reduction in emissions, noise and cost,” ESS Inc CEO Eric Dresselhuys — who joined the northwest US-headquartered company earlier this month — said.

ESS Inc has long argued that its systems pose far less fire risk than lithium-ion batteries but that the iron solution used for electrolyte is cheaper than the vanadium used by rival flow battery companies. Even if the electrolyte were to leak, the company has said that third-party safety research showed the contents of the battery to be basically fertiliser.
» Read article                   

GE, others see hybrid storage as ‘the future’ of grid reliability but face technology, optimization challenges
By Jason Plautz, Utility Dive
April 26, 2021

As utilities rapidly expand their renewable energy offerings, hybrid solar and storage solutions are a key technology for maintaining grid reliability, speakers said at an annual Energy Storage Association Conference last week. “Hybrids are the future,” said Mike Bowman, chief technology officer for GE’s renewable hybrids arm, adding that they’re a “natural progression” for the grid. 

The hybrid systems, which co-locate generators and batteries on the same site, have the advantage of reducing transmission and sharing on installation costs and permitting. They can also offer greater dispatch flexibility for grid operators.

However, hybrid systems are hampered by the constantly-evolving technology, the high up-front cost of the systems and uncertainty about integration into the larger grid. “Interconnection rules and tying interconnection to optimize hybrid … is something the industry is struggling with right now,” said Evan Bierman, director of energy storage product management and renewable integration for EDF Renewables.
» Read article                    

» More about energy storage           

 

CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

Shipping Looks to Hydrogen as It Seeks to Ditch Bunker Fuel
Discord within oil-reliant industry over how to power the workhorses of global trade in the net zero era.
By Harry Dempsey, Financial Times, in Inside Climate News
April 28, 2021

The Compagnie Belge Maritime du Congo launched its first steam-powered ship, the SS Leopold, on its maiden trip from Antwerp to Congo in 1895. Today CMB, the colonial-era group’s successor, carries commuters between the Belgian city and nearby Kruibeke on a ferry fueled by hydrogen.

“This is the fourth energy revolution in shipping—from rowing our boats to sails to steam engine to diesel engine and we have to change it once more,” said Alex Saverys, CMB chief executive and scion of one of Belgium’s oldest shipping families.

Shipping produces about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and without action its contribution is likely to rise for decades as global trade grows. The International Maritime Organization, the UN agency that regulates the global industry, wants to at least halve its impact by 2050.

Many industry figures are pinning their hopes on blue or green hydrogen—produced using natural gas with carbon capture or renewable electricity and whose only byproduct when combusted is water—to help steer away from polluting bunker fuel.

“There is no question whether hydrogen will be the energy carrier of shipping in 2050,” said Lasse Kristoffersen, chief executive of Norway’s Torvald Klaveness. “The question is, how do you produce it and which form do you use it as a carrier?”

Hydrogen has low energy density compared with heavy fuel oil. Storing it in its liquid form below minus 253 degrees Celsius requires heavy cryogenic tanks that take up precious space, rendering it unfeasible for large cargo ships.

“With the current state of technology, we cannot use hydrogen to fuel our vessels,” said Morten Bo Christiansen, head of decarbonization at AP Moller-Maersk, MSC’s larger rival.

However, the industry has grown increasingly optimistic about using ammonia, a compound of hydrogen and nitrogen, to fuel the workhorses of global trade without belching out greenhouse gases.

Though foul-smelling and toxic, ammonia is easy to liquify, is already transported worldwide at scale and has nearly twice the energy density of liquid hydrogen.
» Read article                   

Battery Breakthrough Gives Boost to Electric Flight and Long-Range Electric Cars
New battery technology developed at Berkeley Lab could give flight to electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and supercharge safe, long-range electric cars
By Theresa Duque, Berkeley Lab News Center
July 20, 2020

In the pursuit of a rechargeable battery that can power electric vehicles (EVs) for hundreds of miles on a single charge, scientists have endeavored to replace the graphite anodes currently used in EV batteries with lithium metal anodes.

But while lithium metal extends an EV’s driving range by 30–50%, it also shortens the battery’s useful life due to lithium dendrites, tiny treelike defects that form on the lithium anode over the course of many charge and discharge cycles. What’s worse, dendrites short-circuit the cells in the battery if they make contact with the cathode.

For decades, researchers assumed that hard, solid electrolytes, such as those made from ceramics, would work best to prevent dendrites from working their way through the cell. But the problem with that approach, many found, is that it didn’t stop dendrites from forming or “nucleating” in the first place, like tiny cracks in a car windshield that eventually spread.

Now, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, have reported in the journal Nature Materials a new class of soft, solid electrolytes – made from both polymers and ceramics – that suppress dendrites in that early nucleation stage, before they can propagate and cause the battery to fail.
» Blog editor’s note: this is an article, but I’m including it because it describes a key engineering breakthrough that opened a pathway to much better (and more sustainable) EV batteries in the near future.
» Read article                 

Bye Aerospace announces eFlyer 800 eight-seater electric aircraft
By Ben Coxworth, New Atlas
April 22, 2021

Colorado-based electric aviation startup Bye Aerospace is currently best known for its two-seater eFlyer 2 aircraft. That may soon change, though, as the company has now unveiled a planned battery-powered eight-seater.

Named the eFlyer 800, the turboprop class airplane will be able to seat a maximum of seven passengers, along with one or two pilots in front.

Thrust will be provided by two wing-mounted ENGINeUS electric motors, manufactured by project partner Safran Electrical & Power. These will be powered by quad-redundant lithium battery packs, for an estimated range of 500 nautical miles per charge (575 miles/926 km). The plane will have a rate of climb of 3,400 feet (1,036 m) per minute, and a ceiling of 35,000 feet (10,668 m).
» Read article                 

» More about clean transportation               

 

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

US Senate votes to reinstate methane rules loosened by Trump
Congressional Democrats move to reinstate regulations designed to limit potent greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas fields
By Associated Press, in The Guardian
April 29, 2021
» Read article                 

California takes steps to ban fracking by 2024 and will halt oil extraction by 2045
Executive order is a reversal for Governor Gavin Newsom, who faced pressure from environmental groups for previously resisting a ban
By Maanvi Singh, The Guardian
April 23, 2021
» Read article                    

» More about fossil fuel                

 

BIOMASS

Paris climate agreement overlooks wood pellet loophole
“This rule that was designed to prevent you from counting carbon twice has effectively become a rule in which no carbon is counted at all.”
By Cameron Oglesby, Environmental Health News
April 26, 2021

With the U.S. back in the Paris Agreement, and with governments across the country evaluating how they can cut carbon emissions, a question remains about one contentious “carbon neutral” energy source: wood pellets.

Wood pellets are burned as a form of biomass energy, or bioenergy, and are touted as a “carbon neutral” energy source in the global transition away from fossil fuels. It became an energy staple for European countries in 2009 when the European Union set goals to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent of 1990 levels by the year 2020. In 2019, the EU accounted for approximately 75 percent of global wood pellet consumption.

A 2012 study projected that by 2020 about 60 percent of the EU’s renewable energy would come from burning wood pellets as a carbon neutral alternative to coal. And data released by the EU at the end of 2020 indicates that they were set to meet this 20 percent goal while on track to reduce emissions by 37 percent by 2030.

But this latest report did not directly mention the use of wood pellets in the EU, primarily for residential heating, in its energy budget. This exclusion is emblematic of a flawed carbon accounting system for wood pellets that is leaving a chunk of emissions uncounted, and experts say the Paris Agreement will only create more missed emissions from the biomass sector.

Producers harvest about 4.9 million metric tons of wood annually from the biodiverse forests of the Southeast U.S. These felled trees release carbon when cut and their end-use is as a fuel, which makes for tricky climate accounting.

“The way that emissions in general are reported at the national level as well as to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is by energy use and land use. Unfortunately, bioenergy falls into both categories,” Rita Frost, campaigns director for the Southeastern forest protection nonprofit the Dogwood Alliance, told EHN. “We created accounting rules that said for bioenergy purposes, we’re going to count the carbon emissions when you cut down the tree, so you don’t have to count it when it goes out of the smokestack.”

When a forest is cut down in North Carolina to make wood pellets, the carbon is supposed to be counted by the U.S. in their annual climate reports as a carbon sink loss. Forests, especially old growth forests like those found in the Southeast U.S., are an important source of carbon removal from the atmosphere, so when a forest is cut down, the emissions are, in theory, counted as a land use emission.

The emissions from wood pellets are not counted in the energy sector, “to do so would erroneously double count the climate impact of wood pellets in both the land sector and the energy sector,” wrote a representative from the largest biomass supplier in the world, Enviva Biomass, in an email to EHN.

However, because of the way forests are classified in the U.S., these emissions aren’t counted in either the land or energy sectors, Frost said.

“If you clear-cut a forest, as long as you don’t turn the land into a parking lot or a tobacco farm, that land is still accounted for as forest,” she said. “So this rule that was designed to prevent you from counting carbon twice has effectively become a rule in which no carbon is counted at all, and biomass looks like it’s carbon neutral.”
» Read article                   

» More about biomass              

 

PLASTICS IN THE ENVIRONMENT

Scientists find way to remove polluting microplastics with bacteria
Sticky property of bacteria used to create microbe nets that can capture microplastics in water to form a recyclable blob
By Sofia Quaglia, The Guardian
April 28, 2021
» Read article                   

» More about plastics in the environment              

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Weekly News Check-In 2/19/21

Welcome back.

The reason we so frequently lead this newsletter with an update on the Weymouth compressor station is because its very existence – and its location near environmental justice neighborhoods – is a clear local example of activists and policymakers wrestling with entrenched fossil fuel interests for a shot at a livable future. The head referee in this match is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), now under the chairmanship of Richard Glick and supported by the Biden administration, in a country recommitted to the Paris Climate Agreement. On this new, reality-based playing field, FERC has agreed to have another look at this compressor and its effect on the health and safety of the community that was forced to “host” it. We’ll be watching this next round, with great appreciation to Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station (FRRACS) and others who have mounted unwavering, effective, and courageous resistance for six long years.

More about new developments at FERC.

It’s a new day for pipelines, too, with Dakota Access possibly the highest-profile project at risk. Protests and actions continue despite the pandemic and harsh winter weather. Activists delivered a couple wheelbarrows of coal to the doorstep of New England’s grid operator, saying it’s time to ramp down funding for the Merrimack Generating Station in Bow, NH.

Grey Sail Brewing of Westerly, RI has installed carbon capture equipment on its brewing operation, joining a growing list of micro-breweries greening their businesses by recycling carbon dioxide rather than releasing it to the atmosphere. Brewing is well-suited for this, as the fermentation process releases CO2 that the brewer later adds back into the product – and new equipment is economical for small operators.

We’re using our climate section to highlight new books by Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill Gates. While Gates lays out the climate challenges and opportunities before us, Kolbert describes the truly unsettling series of planet-scale geoengineering hacks that humans might pursue if we fail to lower planet-warming emissions fast enough.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Governor Greg Abbott, and a chorus of fossil industry boosters attempted to use the massive Texas grid failure to do a hit job on clean energy – mounting a disinformation campaign to falsely blame a few frozen wind turbines for the disaster that killed dozens and spread hardship across most of that huge state. We’re not having it. The state’s creaky and under-regulated natural gas infrastructure was by far the main culprit. But we did notice that Senator “Flyin’ Ted” Cruze took a break from all that inconvenience and discomfort and bolted his Houston home for a luxury resort in balmy Cancún, Mexico while his constituents shivered in the dark. We’ll remember that.

The home energy storage market is maturing a bit, with new battery chemistries poised to offer safer and more durable alternatives to current-generation devices. We provide a long excerpt from an excellent article that lays it all out. Similarly, the push for improved electric vehicle batteries passed an important milestone.

Freakish weather and the fossil fuel industry ganged up on Texas this past week. We have more info in this section. Also, California is pushing to ban fracking.

While climate and environmental justice advocates push Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker to reject biomass energy and the proposed Palmer Renewable Energy plant in Springfield, a group of over 500 scientists has published a demand to stop considering the burning of trees to be a climate solution. This has been Massachusetts’ (correct) position since 2012, until the Baker administration decided to reverse course – proposing to reinstate energy generated from burning woody biomass to the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard.

We close with two reports that illuminate some of the difficulties with plastics recycling.

  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

WEYMOUTH COMPRESSOR STATION

Federal commission to explore impacts of compressor station
By Jessica Trufant, The Patriot Ledger
February 18, 2021

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will further explore public safety concerns associated with the Weymouth Compressor Station, though it’s unclear what impact that could have on the facility.

The federal commission in September gave the Canadian company that built the compressor station approval to put the facility into service. In response, the Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station, the city of Quincy, and other petitioners requested the commission revoke the authorization and reconsider its approval of the project.

FERC on Thursday voted to take a look at several issues associated with the compressor station, including whether the station’s expected air emissions and public safety impacts should prompt commissioners to reexamine the project.

Members of the citizens group opposed to the compressor station said they are investigating what FERC’s decision on Thursday means for operations of the station.

State Sen. Patrick O’Connor, a Weymouth Republican, said the commission’s decision suggests “the fight is far from over.”

The controversial compressor station is part of Enbridge’s Atlantic Bridge project, which expands the company’s natural gas pipelines from New Jersey into Canada. It has been a point of contention for years among residents of the area, who say it presents serious health and safety problems.
» Read article       
» Read the FERC press release

» More about the Weymouth compressor station

FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

How a pipeline-loving agency could be the key to Biden’s climate plan
By Zoya Teirstein, Grist
February 18, 2021

There’s a saying among energy wonks about the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: It’s never seen a pipeline it didn’t like. But the commission’s new chair could make that adage a thing of the past.

The independent commission known as FERC, pronounced like a kid-friendly version of the popular expletive, was established by Congress in 1977 to regulate the United States’ energy landscape. FERC wields an enormous amount of power, overseeing the nation’s pipelines, natural gas infrastructure, transmission lines, hydroelectric dams, electricity markets, and, by association, the price of renewables and fossil fuels. It’s made up of up to five commissioners — no more than three members of the same party can serve at a time — including one chair, who sets the commission’s agenda.

Historically, the commission has not done a good job of taking climate change and environmental justice into account as it has approved and regulated energy projects across the U.S. “I would put FERC in the basket of agencies that have huge climate relevance, but where climate has generally not been front and center,” Barry Rabe, a professor of public and environmental policy at the University of Michigan, told Grist. A system for accounting for climate impacts isn’t baked into FERC’s structure, he explained. That could change as President Joe Biden executes a “whole of government” approach to tackling climate change.

“One of the most interesting places to do climate policy is at FERC,” Representative Sean Casten, Democrat from Illinois, told Grist in January. “What would it mean to actually change markets to accelerate the deployment of clean energy? Frankly, you can be much more policy smart and much more environmentally ambitious doing that in the context of a FERC hearing than you can doing it through Congress.”
» Read article       

New FERC Chair’s Focus: Environmental Justice and Climate Change Impacts
Glick’s priorities include fair treatment of new technologies and state policies, as well as transmission and interconnection reforms.
By Jeff St. John, GreenTech Media
February 15, 2021

Richard Glick has a long list of priorities for his chairmanship of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He has already outlined many of them, such as reforming energy market policies that restrict state-supported clean energy resources, expanding transmission capacity and unblocking new grid interconnections, and incorporating climate change impacts into the agency’s decision-making process.

On Thursday, in his first press conference since being elevated to lead FERC last month by President Joe Biden, Glick brought more clarity to some of FERC’s newest initiatives. These include creating a senior-level position to address environmental justice impacts of its decisions, including those involving natural-gas pipeline projects, to ensure they don’t “unfairly impact historically marginalized communities.”

A 2017 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has put pressure on FERC to change its approach to accounting for the indirect greenhouse gas emissions impacts of natural-gas pipeline projects under its purview. Glick has since dissented against many of the pipeline decisions from the Republican majority at FERC on the grounds that they have failed to consider the greenhouse gas impacts of the projects in question but has been outvoted as the agency’s sole Democratic member.

FERC’s five-member board will retain a three-Republican majority through at least the first half of 2021, which is when Biden will have an opportunity to nominate a Democrat to replace departing commissioner Neil Chatterjee. Glick noted that this political reality implies that, on the matter of considering greenhouse gas impacts of its pipeline decisions, “no matter what we do, it will require three votes” to succeed.

The role of the newly created environmental justice position will be to examine if projects under FERC review will have significant health or economic impacts on communities, and if so, whether the projects can be moved or the impacts mitigated.
» Read article       

FERC Revisits Review of Policy Statement on Interstate Natural Gas Pipeline Proposals
By FERC, News Release
February 18, 2021

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) today reopened its review of the 1999 Policy Statement on the Certification of New Interstate Natural Gas Facilities by asking for new information and additional perspectives that would assist the Commission in moving forward with its review. The Commission is looking to build upon the record already established in response to its April 2018 Notice of Inquiry.

“It’s important to recognize that many changes have occurred since our initial inquiry three years ago,” FERC Chairman Rich Glick said. “I look forward to seeing the comments and working with my fellow commissioners to update our review process for reviewing proposed natural gas projects.”

To guide the process and focus on adding to the existing record, the Commission seeks comments on new questions that modify or add to the April 2018 Notice of Inquiry. For example, the Commission requests comments on how it identifies and addresses potential health or environmental effects of its pipeline certification programs, policies and activities on environmental justice communities.
» Read article         
» Download Notice of Inquiry         

» More about FERC

PIPELINES

Time To Consider The Worst-Case Scenario For Dakota Access: A Look At Energy Transfer And Phillips 66 Partners
By Seeking Alpha
February 17, 2021

Fresh off their Keystone XL victory, environment activists have placed the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) squarely in their crosshairs. A DAPL shutdown will set a worrisome precedent for midstream infrastructure regulation. It also will put at risk the midstream companies that have the most to lose amid a shutdown, namely, Energy Transfer LP (ET) and Phillips 66 Partners LP (PSXP).

The Biden administration has not specified what action it might take on DAPL. During his campaign, Biden did not publicly endorse any particular move. Vice President Harris, meanwhile, is opposed to the pipeline. She joined 36 Democrats in submitting an amicus brief in May 2020 urging the courts to shut it down.

Recent developments have not been favorable for the pipeline. On Jan. 26, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s decision to revoke an environmental permit that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) issued to DAPL before it had performed an Environmental Impact Statement. The court postponed a final ruling on the DAPL until the USACE completes its EIS, likely in late 2021. It allowed the pipeline to operate while the EIS was ongoing.

With the DAPL’s fate now in the hands of the administration, its opponents have become more vocal. On Feb. 5, members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives wrote a letter to Biden urging him to shut the pipeline down.

Then on Feb. 8, dozens of celebrities and activists wrote a letter urging the president to “remedy this historic injustice and direct the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to immediately shut down the illegal Dakota Access Pipeline.”

Clearly, the Biden administration is under immense pressure to shut DAPL down. By contrast, there’s virtually no countervailing pressure from pipeline supporters.
» Read article       

» More about pipelines       

PROTESTS AND ACTIONS

Climate Activists Deliver Wheelbarrows of Coal to ISO-NE Headquarters
Call for grid operator to cease funding coal, other fossil fuels in this week’s forward capacity auction
Press release, Nocoalnogas.org
February 8, 2021

Today, thirty climate activists gathered at the ISO-New England headquarters in Holyoke, Ma, to call on the grid operator to cease funding coal and other harmful fossil fuel sources. Some of the crowd wore white tyvek suits, carried buckets of coal, and chanted “Hey Ho ISO, we don’t want no dirty coal!” while walking to the entrance of ISO-NE’s headquarters. The individuals in tyvek suits dumped their buckets of coal into two wheelbarrows that were delivered to the front gate of the building.

ISO-NE will hold its annual forward capacity auction on Monday, February 8th, to determine how much guaranteed funding plants like Merrimack Generating Station in Bow, NH will receive to stay operable through 2025. The results can either limit or expand the speed of our transition from fossil fuels to renewables across the region.

» Read article        

U.K. High Court Says Nigerians Can Sue Shell in Britain Over Oil Spills
The Dutch energy company has a presence in Britain, and a judge ruled there was “a real issue to be tried.”
By Stanley Reed, New York Times
February 12, 2021

Britain’s Supreme Court said Friday that a group of about 50,000 Nigerian farmers and fishermen could bring a case in London’s High Court against Royal Dutch Shell over years of oil spills in the Niger Delta that have polluted their land, wells and waterways.

The judges said there was the potential that a parent company like Shell, which has its headquarters in the Netherlands but a large British presence, has responsibility for the activities of subsidiaries like the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, which operates in the delta region.

The court overruled a lower court that had said there was no case to be brought against Shell in Britain. On Friday, the judges said there was “a real issue to be tried.”

The ruling is “a watershed moment in the accountability of multinational companies,” said Daniel Leader, a partner in the British law firm Leigh Day, who led the legal team representing the Nigerian communities.

Mr. Leader added that the judgment would most likely increase the ability of “impoverished communities” to hold powerful companies to account. Indeed, courts in Western countries have recently indicated that they were increasingly open to hearing such cases. Last month, a court in the Netherlands ruled that Shell was liable for pollution in another case involving Nigerian farmers.
» Read article       
» Read about the Netherlands ruling against Shell

» More about protests and actions

GREENING THE ECONOMY

Carbon capture and brews: Rhode Island brewery puts emissions back into beers
Systems for capturing carbon emissions from brewing operations have become more economical for small brewers during the pandemic.
By Lisa Prevost, Energy News Network
Photo By Grey Sail Brewing / Courtesy
February 15, 2021

After a decade of beer brewing in the beach town of Westerly, Rhode Island, Grey Sail Brewing has grown from a small operation brewing up batches of its signature Flagship Ale to a regional purveyor of more than half a dozen different beers.

Grey Sail is the first craft brewery in Rhode Island, and the second in New England, to install carbon-capturing technology specially designed for microbreweries. Developed by Earthly Labs, based in Austin, Texas, the system captures the waste carbon dioxide, produced during fermentation, enabling it to be used to carbonate and package the beer.

“Brewing is unique in that you generate carbon as a byproduct, but you also consume it too,” Alan Brinton said. “This investment allows us to reap environmental benefits from brewing great beer.”

Standing next to massive stainless steel fermentation tanks, Brinton explains that the yeast used to ferment the beer breaks down the malt sugar and converts it to alcohol and carbon dioxide, or CO2. Whereas before that CO2 would have simply been released into the atmosphere, now it is captured through a piping system, converted to liquid in a refrigerator-sized box, and stored.

Brinton estimates that he’s currently capturing about 2,000 pounds of CO2 monthly; that level will rise when beer production revs up during the warmer months.

Carbon capture technology is not new to the beer industry as a whole, but it hasn’t been affordable or efficient enough for smaller-scale brewers before now, said Chuck Skypeck, technical brewing projects manager for the Brewers Association, a national organization.

The Earthly Labs system, called CiCi — short for carbon capture — is currently operating in about three dozen craft breweries. It’s designed to be affordable, easy to use and deliver economic value to brewers who produce between 5,000 and 20,000 barrels annually. (Grey Sail makes about 10,000 barrels.)

“Annually, each of these brewers can capture the equivalent of the absorption work of 1,500 trees if they use the technology every week,” George said.
» Read article       

» More about greening the economy

CLIMATE

Interview: Elizabeth Kolbert on why we’ll never stop messing with nature
By Shannon Osaka, Grist
February 8, 2021

In Australia, scientists collect buckets of coral sperm, mixing one species with another in an attempt to create a new “super coral” that can withstand rising temperatures and acidifying seas. In Nevada, scientists nurse a tiny colony of one-inch long “Devil’s Hole pupfish” in an uncomfortably hot, Styrofoam-molded pool. And in Massachusetts, Harvard University scientists research injecting chemicals into the atmosphere to dim the sun’s light — and slow down the runaway pace of global warming.

These are some of the scenes from Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, a global exploration of the ways that humanity is attempting to engineer, fix, or reroute the course of nature in a climate-changed world. (The title refers to one of the consequences of engineering the Earth to better reflect sunlight: Our usual blue sky could turn a pale white.)

Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer, has been covering the environment for decades: Her first book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, traced the scientific evidence for global warming from Greenland to Alaska; her second, The Sixth Extinction, followed the growing pace of animal extinctions.

Under a White Sky covers slightly different ground. Humanity is now, Kolbert explains, in the midst of the Anthropocene — a geologic era in which we are the dominant force shaping earth, sea, and sky. Faced with that reality, humans have gotten more creative at using technology to fix the problems that we unwittingly spawned: Stamping out Australia’s cane toad invasion with genetic engineering, for example, or using giant air conditioners to suck carbon dioxide out of air and turn it into rock. As Kolbert notes, tongue-in-cheek: “What could possibly go wrong?”
» Read article       

Bill Gates: A stark and simple message for the world
His new book affirms what climate scientists have been saying for decades. But Bill Gates says it well, all the same.
By Tim Radford, Climate News Network | Book Review
February 15, 2021

Bill Gates − yes, that Bill Gates − has for years been financing studies in geo-engineering: he calls it a “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” kind of tool.

But he also says, in a new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: the Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, that he has put much more money into the challenge of adapting to and mitigating climate change − driven by global heating powered by greenhouse emissions that are a consequence of our dependence on fossil fuels.

The founder of Microsoft, now a philanthropist, says all geo-engineering approaches − to dim the sunlight, perhaps, or make clouds brighter − turn out to be relatively cheap compared with the scale of the problems ahead for the world. All the effects are relatively short-lived, so there might be no long-term impacts.

But the third thing they have in common is that the technical challenges to implementing them would be as nothing compared with the political hurdles such ambitions must face.

There are some very encouraging things about this disarming book, and one of them is that on every page it addresses the messy uncertainties of the real world, rather than an ideal set of solutions.

People who have already thought a lot about the hazards and complexities of global temperature rise might be tempted to dismiss it as Climate Change for Dummies. They’d be wrong.

First, Gates addresses a global audience that includes (for instance) US Republican voters, fewer than one in four of whom understand that climate change is a consequence of what humans have done.

Then Gates writes as an engineer. He starts from the basics and arrives swiftly and by the shortest route at a series of firm conclusions: sophisticated, but still outlined with considerable clarity and a happy trick of pinning big answers to down-to-earth analogies
» Read article       

» More about climate

CLEAN ENERGY

Conservatives Are Seriously Accusing Wind Turbines of Killing People in the Texas Blackouts
Tucker Carlson and others are using the deadly storm to attack wind power, but the state’s independent, outdated grid and unreliable natural gas generation are to blame.
By Kate Aronoff, New Republic
February 16, 2021

Within a few hours of grid horror stories percolating out beyond the Lone Star state, outlets like Breitbart and the Wall Street Journal began to publish grisly tales of a green revolution: that an abundance of wind turbines in Texas had been rendered practically useless by a chilly day and posed a danger to state residents. “The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died,” said Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Yet a surprising number of mainstream media outlets also adopted the narrative. Reuters, for example, mentioned offline wind resources in the first lines of its story about the outages—illustrated with a picture showing a field of turbines. “Frozen wind turbines contribute to rolling power blackouts across Texas,” ran CNN’s headline. The New York Times led with it, too.

As of Monday afternoon, 26 of the 34 gigawatts in ERCOT’s grid that had gone offline were from “thermal” sources, meaning gas and coal. The system’s total installed capacity in the system, Power magazine’s Sonal Patel noted, is around 77.2 GW. Wind and solar power, meanwhile, produced near or even above planned capacity, according to energy analyst Jesse Jenkins, as only small amounts of wind and solar are utilized in peaking conditions. Wind turbines did indeed freeze, and did eventually underperform. But so did natural gas infrastructure, and to a far greater degree. That proved to be a much larger problem since it makes up such a huge proportion of the state’s power supply in extreme weather. And frozen power lines and equipment were a far bigger cause of outages than generation shortages.

As Rice University’s Daniel Cohan put it on Twitter, “ERCOT expected to get low capacity factors from wind and solar during winter peak demand. What it didn’t expect is >20 GW of outages from thermal (mostly natural gas) power plants.” Despite these realities, the narrative about the outages thus far has disproportionately focused on turbines underperforming in the cold due to ice on their blades—and barely mentioned failures in the vast majority of the grid powered by fossil fuels.

Events like this are a godsend to fossil fuel interests eager to build more polluting infrastructure. Investor-owned utilities can’t simply raise rates whenever they like. Instead, they have to go to regulators in statewide public service commissions to “rate base” new infrastructure, i.e., pass the cost of things like new polluting “peaker plants” down to customers. Spun the right way, the chaos playing out in Texas could help them make the case for rate hikes and new fossil fuel infrastructure around the country—all the more so if regulators already enjoy a cozy relationship to the power companies they’re supposed to rein in.
» Read article        

As Vermont nears 75% renewable power, advocates question if it’s clean enough
Most of the power being used to satisfy the state’s renewable electricity standard comes from Hydro-Québec as local wind and solar development lag.
By David Thill, Energy News Network
Photo By Sharath G. / Creative Commons
February 15, 2021

On paper, Vermont boasts one of the cleanest electric grids in the country.

About 66% of the state’s electricity came from renewables in 2019, the most recent year for which final numbers are available. The state’s Renewable Energy Standard requires utilities to get to at least 75% renewables by 2032, including wind, solar, biomass and hydropower.

The problem, critics say, is that utilities are meeting a huge portion of their requirements with out-of-state hydropower, which comes with its own set of ethical and ecological strings attached. Counting renewable energy credits, about 44% of the state’s electricity in 2019 was from Hydro-Québec. Another 19.9% came from other hydroelectric sources, and 2.12% from solar.

“My belief is that we should be shifting towards as much in-state production of renewables as possible,” said Steve Crowley, energy chair of the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club, which doesn’t think the current system is helping promote true clean energy development.

Like other states, Vermont is moving forward on a long-term push to increase building and transit electrification to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in those sectors. The large-scale transformation won’t be truly clean if the electricity doesn’t come from clean sources.

But clean energy advocates like Crowley say the current criteria for meeting the state’s renewable electricity standard allows utilities to lean far too much on out-of-state renewable energy credits, particularly from Hydro-Québec. In 2019, Hydro-Québec accounted for 69% of utilities’ “Tier 1” resources, the largest and broadest category in the state’s renewable standard.

Hydro-Québec has been a source of controversy throughout New England. Critics say the construction of its dam system in Québec has caused large-scale forest flooding. Not only has that destroyed a carbon sink, but it’s also displaced Indigenous communities in the region and been linked to mercury toxicity in the food they eat.
» Read article       

» More about clean energy

ENERGY STORAGE

Will Safer Batteries Finally Take Over the Home Storage Market?
Tesla and LG Chem rule the market with their NMC battery products, but the LFP battery contenders believe their technology’s time has come.
By Julian Spector, GreenTech Media
February 17, 2021

Tesla and LG Chem currently dominate the U.S. home battery market. Both use the lithium nickel-manganese-cobalt oxide (NMC) chemistry favored by the electric vehicle industry. In cars, the goal is to pack as much energy into as little space as possible. That comes with a tradeoff: the potential for cells to heat up and kick off a chain reaction that can end with fire and, in enclosed spaces, explosion.

But the umbrella term “lithium-ion battery” covers a range of chemistries. A vocal cohort of startups has argued for years that homeowners would be better off with less fire-prone varieties. The favorite contender in this category is lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP), which has an established safety record.

“We chose LFP since the beginning because of its safety properties,” said Danny Lu, senior vice president at grid battery company Powin Energy. “It’s much less flammable, and it takes a much higher temperature to reach thermal runaway than NMC does.”

Thermal runaway is the process in which one battery cell fails and heats up enough to kick off failure in a neighboring cell. Pretty soon a whole rack of batteries can be heating up from the inside, causing fires or worse.

That’s a concern for the kinds of large-scale power plants that Powin recently raised $100 million to supply. But large battery plants are designed with special safeguards to prevent thermal runaway from inflicting massive damage, and typically operate remotely, with no staff onsite. Homes with battery packs, by contrast, lack industrial-grade fire safety tools, and are occupied by humans and pets who would be threatened by a fire.

LFP used to be commercially disadvantaged against NMC, because the chemistry cost more and took up more space. Now, costs have fallen into competitive territory and energy density has improved, making converts of some former NMC fans. After years in which the exhortations of LFP aficionados failed to move the market, trends may be shifting in their favor.

In the early days, using LFP would have meant roughly doubling the cost of batteries and taking up extra space for a home installation, said Aric Saunders, EVP for sales and marketing at home battery startup ElectrIQ. ElectrIQ designed its first two product generations around NMC batteries.

Meanwhile, LFP has steadily gained traction with customers.

One of the few companies manufacturing such batteries in the U.S. is SimpliPhi Power, based in the coastal city of Oxnard, Calif. The company got its start supplying Hollywood film productions, and later the military, with off-grid battery power. That required rugged technology that could stand up to heat and wouldn’t endanger cast and crew. Staff tested “every chemistry available” and “every form factor” and decided to produce LFP, Von Burg said.

“You can say that cobalt batteries are more energy-dense, but the truth is you can’t use the energy in the same robust way as you can with LFP,”  Von Burg noted. “There’s a lot in the performance profile that cuts away and erodes the cost benefit.”

There’s also a more nuanced conversation to be had about battery pricing.

Upfront cost can’t be ignored. But LFP batteries deliver more lifetime energy throughput before they wear out, said Adam Gentner, vice president of sonnen, which exclusively sells LFP battery packs for homes. If a customer wants a battery “just for backup power to an out-building,” NMC may be fine for that infrequent use, Gentner said. But if the goal is to safely use the battery every day, to make use of solar power or make money by delivering services to the grid, LFP is the better pick.

“I expect that we’ll begin seeing the balance tip towards LFP in the coming year,” he said.

Some battery experts are looking for alternatives that go beyond LFP. UCSD battery expert Meng said LFP is “a good intermediate solution until we find the ultimate solution for home energy storage,” which would be a battery that lasts 20 years at a radically lower cost.

Entrepreneur Ryan Brown is trying to build nonflammable residential batteries using zinc and water with his Halifax-based startup, Salient Energy. The goal is to get cheaper than any lithium-ion competitors based on the lower costs of zinc as an active ingredient. Unlike other challengers to conventional batteries, this design uses the same roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques that coat electrodes in lithium-ion factories.

“There’s nothing in it that’s toxic; there’s nothing in it that could possibly catch fire,” Brown said.
» Read article       

Colocating energy storage alongside renewables adds to lender appeal
By Edith Hancock, Energy Storage News
February 17, 2021

Colocating battery energy storage systems alongside renewables projects will be ‘critical’ to energy networks in the future, and could help level up debt financing.

That was the take home point from a panel discussion on solar-plus-storage projects during the virtual Solar Finance & Investment Europe conference hosted by Energy-Storage.news publisher Solar Media earlier this month.

Mark Henderson, chief investment officer of UK-based storage and electric vehicle (EV) charging business Gridserve, said the key factor preventing lenders from handing out debt to developers is “down to the revenue streams”.

“The big challenge with adding batteries over the years has been that they have played into a number of markets,” he said, “and those markets are often very shallow.” However, co-locating storage with solar can increase investors’ appetite.

“By having them together, it means that you can elaborate more on the service side, which you can always see spread across the whole project. The gearing on a combined service storage project is certainly better than you’d be getting on a storage-only project.”
» Read article       

» More about energy storage

CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

VW partner Quantumscape clears another hurdle on road to solid-state battery
By Bridie Schmidt, The Driven
February 18, 2021

Volkswagen-backed Quantumscape, the company that hit the news in December hailing a “major breakthrough” in its quest to commercialise solid-state batteries, says it has cleared another important hurdle.

Solid-state batteries are something of a holy grail for the electric vehicle industry and have the potential to substantially increase driving range and charging speed. But to date, solid-state cell degradation under normal operating conditions (eg temperature) has kept the technology from commercial success.

Having achieved “automotive performance” in a single-layer cell in 2020, Quantumsape says it has now achieved the next step towards overcoming this hurdle, having made a multilayer cell that can cycle 800 times.
» Read article       

» More about clean transportation

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

Texas’ natural gas production just froze under pressure
Texas’ natural gas infrastructure was already vulnerable
By Justine Calma, The Verge
February 17, 2021

Natural gas wells and pipes ill-equipped for cold weather are a big reason why millions of Texans lost power during frigid temperatures this week. As temperatures dropped to record lows across some parts of the state, liquid inside wells, pipes, and valves froze solid.

Ice can block gas flow, clogging pipes. It’s a phenomenon called a “freeze-off” that disrupts gas production across the US every winter. But freeze-offs can have outsized effects in Texas, as we’ve seen this week. The state is a huge natural gas producer — and it doesn’t usually have to deal with such cold weather.

“When we think about what’s been going on in the last week and why it’s turned the market completely on its head is the fact that the freeze offs are occurring in Texas,” says Erika Coombs, director of oil & gas products at research firm BTU Analytics.

Texas relies on natural gas more than any other fuel for its electricity generation. Gas generated nearly half of the state’s electricity in 2019, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Wind and coal each accounted for about 20 percent of electricity generation that year, while nuclear made up about another 10 percent. While nuclear and wind power have been hampered by the storm, neither frigid nuclear plants nor frozen wind turbines bear the largest share of responsibility for Texas’ power problems.

“It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system,” Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, said during a call with reporters on February 16th, the Texas Tribune reported.

While the frigid cold slashed fuel supplies of all sorts, it also drove up demand for natural gas to heat homes. That “mismatch” is what’s driving these blackouts, says Coombs. There simply hasn’t been enough fuel on hand to power the state’s electricity needs. Natural gas production was pretty much halved in Texas and its gas-rich Permian Basin during the recent cold and stormy weather. It fell from 22.5 billion cubic feet of gas produced per day in December to between 10 to 12 billion cubic feet of gas per day this week, according to estimates from BTU Analytics.
» Read article       

‘No time to waste’: California bill would ban fracking in state by 2027
Proposal is likely to be one of the most contentious fights in the state legislature this year
By The Guardian
February 17, 2021
» Read article       

» More about fossil fuel

BIOMASS

Activists Urge Gov. Baker To Reverse Energy Rules That Boost Biomass
By Paul Tuthill, WAMC
February 17, 2021

Imminent changes to renewable energy regulations in Massachusetts concern opponents of a long-proposed biomass power plant in Springfield.

At a rally Wednesday in front of the Massachusetts state office building in downtown Springfield, activists launched a campaign to try to pressure Gov. Charlie Baker to withdraw proposed changes to renewable energy rules that would incentivize large-scale biomass power plants.

The activists fear the new rules will benefit Palmer Renewable Energy, which for 12 years has pushed to build a 35-megawatt biomass plant at an industrial site in East Springfield.  The project has been the target of public protests and court challenges, where the developer has always prevailed.

An update to the state’s Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard – the regulatory mandate for using power from renewable sources –is on track to be finalized early this year.

“The governor can stop this, if he chooses to stop it,” said Verne McArthur of the Springfield Climate Justice Coalition.

The 11th hour campaign to get the Baker administration to reverse course on making biomass eligible for renewable energy subsidies will include letter-writing, phone banks, and social media, according to McArthur.

“We have a very well organized campaign and there is a lot of opposition to this around the state,” said McArthur.

Opponents of the Springfield biomass project have long argued that a wood-burning power plant would have a devastating impact on the city that was dubbed “Asthma Capital” in 2019 by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.
» Read article       

500+ Scientists Demand Stop to Tree Burning as Climate Solution
“Companies are shifting fossil energy use to wood, which increases warming, as a substitute for shifting to solar and wind, which would truly decrease warming.”
By Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams
February 12, 2021

A group of over 500 international scientists on Thursday urged world leaders to end policies that prop up the burning of trees for energy because it poses “a double climate problem” that threatens forests’ biodiversity and efforts to stem the planet’s ecological emergency.

The demand came in a letter addressed to European Commission President Urusla Von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel, U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The signatories—including renowned botanist Dr. Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden—reject the assertion that burning biomass is carbon neutral.

Referring to forest “preservation and restoration” as key in meeting the nations’ declared goals of carbon neutrality by 2050, the letter frames the slashing of trees for bioenergy as “misguided.”

“We urge you not to undermine both climate goals and the world’s biodiversity by shifting from burning fossil fuels to burning trees to generate energy,” the group wrote.

The destruction of forests, which are a carbon sink, creates a “carbon debt.” And though regrowing “trees and displacement of fossil fuels may eventually pay off this carbon debt,” the signatories say that “regrowth takes time the world does not have to solve climate change.”

What’s more, burning trees is “carbon-inefficient,” they say. “Overall, for each kilowatt hour of heat or electricity produced, using wood initially is likely to add two to three times as much carbon to the air as using fossil fuels.”

Another issue is that efforts using taxpayer money to sustain biomass burning stymies what are truly renewable energy policies.

“Government subsidies for burning wood create a double climate problem because this false solution is replacing real carbon reductions,” the letter states. “Companies are shifting fossil energy use to wood, which increases warming, as a substitute for shifting to solar and wind, which would truly decrease warming.”

The letter denounces as further troubling proposals to burn palm oil and soybean, which would entail further deforestation to make way for palm and soy crops.
» Read article       

» More about biomass

PLASTICS RECYCLING

Chemical Recycling Is No Silver Bullet for Eliminating Plastic Waste
Chemical recycling projects are attracting massive investments but, so far, the ROI is negligible.
By Clare Goldsberry, Plastics Today
February 13, 2021

A paper published last fall in Chemical & Engineering News (CEN) by the American Chemical Society (ACS), “Companies are placing big bets on plastics recycling. Are the odds in their favor?” noted that “chemical recycling is attracting billions in capital spending, but environmentalists don’t think it will solve the plastic waste problem.”

This isn’t news. Consumers and especially anti-plastics activists have lost faith in the plastic industry’s ability to help solve a problem it has been accused of creating, and the slow pace of advanced recycling technologies, aka chemical recycling, hasn’t helped renew confidence that this will be the silver bullet that will rid the world of plastic waste. But attempts continue unabated and the cost of trying is proving to be extremely high.

Even the pace of adoption of various types of plastic, from recyclable traditional plastics such as PET and HDPE to bioplastics, as alternatives to traditional plastics seems extremely slow. The chemical recycling industry also has taken hits, as noted above. For example, the CEN/ACS paper opened by saying that in 2022 “Mondelez International intends to start packaging its Philadelphia brand cream cheese in a tube made from chemically recycled plastics. The packaging maker Berry Global will mold the containers. Petrochemical giant Sabic will supply the polypropylene. And the start-up Plastic Energy will produce feedstock for that polypropylene from postconsumer plastics at a plant it is constructing on Sabic’s site in Geleen, Netherlands.”

We’re not holding our collective breaths.

For at least a decade I’ve written blogs about the many consumer brand owners such as Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, and Nestlé being pressured by anti-plastics activist group As You Sow to find alternatives to single-use plastic packaging as a means to end plastic waste in the environment. Through shareholder proposals, As You Sow keeps applying the pressure, writing about the continued lack of progress these companies are making and the slow pace of adoption of alternative materials, most of which are no “greener” than plastics when you examine their life-cycle analyses. Still, to appease these activist groups, big brand owners keep promising to find the Holy Grail of recycling that will turn mountains of plastic trash into beautifully pure new plastic, or millions of gallons of fuel and other base chemicals from which to make new plastics.
» Read article       

Coca-Cola Introduces New 100% Recycled Bottle in U.S., But Is It Enough?
By Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
February 16, 2021

In December 2020, a report found Coca-Cola was the top corporate plastic polluter for the third year in a row, meaning its products were found clogging the most places with the largest amounts of plastic pollution.

The company seems to be aiming to clean up its act somewhat this year with the introduction of a 13.2-ounce bottle made with 100-percent recycled PET (rPET) plastic. The company announced the new bottle’s debut in select U.S. states this February, but environmental organizations said the move was too little, too late.

“In 1990, Coca-Cola and Pepsi announced plans to sell their products in recycled plastic bottles. The Washington Post quoted Greenpeace as ‘unimpressed’ at the time, urging the companies to eliminate single-use plastics altogether,” Greenpeace USA senior plastics campaigner Kate Melge said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. “Thirty one years later, companies should not still be boasting about transitioning to recycled content. We remain unimpressed.”
» Read article       

» More about plastics recycling

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