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Category: Energy

  • A government consultation on Ofgem is about to close – and it needs YOUR input quickly

    There’s just ten days left to tell the government that energy regulator Ofgem is not fit for purpose. The deadline approaches just as Ofgem prepares to announce yet another hike to the energy price cap. That is, the regulator will hit household energy bills once again, all while lining the pockets of the profiteering energy companies.

    So, campaign group Fuel Poverty Action is urging people to speak up.

    The consultation: call out the spineless regulator

    In December, the Labour Party government launched a consultation on the operations of energy regulator Ofgem.

    The consultation states that:

    Ofgem was established almost a quarter of a century ago as the independent regulator for gas and electricity markets in Great Britain. At the time, a system of independent regulation was established to drive the move towards competition in gas and electricity supply and replicate the benefits of competition in the monopoly gas and electricity networks. In recent years the energy sector has faced huge challenges. Against this backdrop, it is more important than ever that consumers are protected and that they receive good customer service. Government wants to see an energy market that delivers better outcomes for consumers and a regulator that drives up consumer standards. To address these challenges the government will undertake a review of Ofgem, with the aim of revisiting the role of the regulator and how it delivers to ensure that it can regulate to support an energy market where innovation and high standards help drive better products and services for consumers.

    In short, the government has recognised that the energy regulator is failing in its core remit. Energy prices continue to soar – so Ofgem isn’t protecting consumers.

    Nonetheless, the consultation provides an opportunity for people to show that the regulator isn’t working for them.

    The government is closing the consultation on 28 February – so people need to act fast to get their responses in on time.

    Fuel Poverty Action: Ofgem is failing us, now’s your chance to speak out

    Fuel Poverty Action has launched a letter campaign, with a helpful template letter for people to use as a starting point.

    The letter includes the following demands:

    Make Ofgem a true consumer champion, holding suppliers to account for bad practice, ending the ‘revolving door’ of energy bosses making the decisions, and not making us foot the bill for firms going bust.

    Reduce our bills to fair and affordable levels that meet people’s needs, removing protections that guarantee profits and bonuses for energy companies.

    Make sure everyone automatically gets the best energy deal and customer service they need – and actually protect vulnerable people from profit-hungry suppliers.

    However, to have as much impact as possible, the campaign group urges people to personalise their letters. Crucially, it suggests that respondents should explain how Ofgem’s failures to bring down soaring energy bills is impacting them.

    You can use its letter tool to respond to the consultation here.

    Alongside its letter campaign, the group has also put out a petition to accompany this. Since launching it on 12 February, it has already garnered more than 68,000 signatures. You can also add your name to this here.

    What ‘regulator’? Ofgem in the pockets of profiteering energy companies

    As the Canary has consistently pointed out, the spineless regulator has consistently acted in the interest of energy company shareholders. In August, Ofgem CEO Jonathan Brearley took to BBC Breakfast to defend the price hike as a way energy companies could:

    recover fair costs and a small profit

    This is a so-called ‘regulator’ that just last year allowed energy companies to continue the disgraceful practice of forcing customers onto prepayment meters. That is, it gave them the go-ahead to force their way into people’s homes and install these. Moreover, as the Canary’s Steve Topple pointed out, it’s “wafer-thin” criteria for who counts as vulnerable, leaves many people out too.

    Then there’s the cruel standing charges. Energy companies set and charge this cost to consumers each day. Crucially, energy suppliers will charge this, even when people are not using any energy.

    In 2024, tens of thousands of people called on Ofgem to abolish this. However, the regulator isn’t remotely interested in scrapping it.

    Energy price cap rise incoming…what’s even the point of Ofgem?

    What’s more, the consultation deadline is set to fall just days after Ofgem’s is expected to make the next energy price cap announcement – on 25 February.

    As the Independent reported:

    forecasts show the typical energy bill could soon rise by over £100 a year.

    Whitehall sources have indicated that they expect bills in most UK regions to increase by around £9 a month over next three months

    In particular, it said that:

    Treasury sources have indicated that the new annual cap will be £1,846, up £108 (6.2 per cent) from the current level. This would put it up £156 from the same time last year, and to the highest it has been since January 2024.

    This would be an increase on the same period from last year. Moreover, energy bills would still be way above pre-pandemic prices.

    There couldn’t be more timely evidence that Ofgem continues to so very shamefully let the public down.

    Time to ‘put their feet to the fire’

    Lead Campaigner at Fuel Poverty Action Stuart Bretherton told the Canary why it’s vital as many people as possible take Ofgem to task in the consultation:

    Regulation is supposed to protect us from being ripped off. But Ofgem has long been putting the interests of private energy firms above the needs of ordinary people. No wonder there’s an energy price crisis.

    We’ve seen bumper bonuses for bosses, shareholders making more than a pretty penny, and a revolving door that sees energy bosses having a huge influence on policy.

    Ofgem ignored tens of thousands of people calling for cruel standing charges to be scrapped. They’ve overseen huge payouts for shareholders while our bills have gone up 65% since 2020. It’s high time they worked for us.

    We’ve seen it with water, and we’re seeing it with energy: when profits come first, it means high bills and abysmal service for us.

    Now that Ofgem is under review, we have an opportunity to put their feet to the fire. Add your name to the petition and take a minute to send a letter to demand that they start putting people before private profit.

    So, there’s just over a week to get involved in Fuel Poverty Action’s letter campaign and respond to the consultation.

    However, the Labour government has a prolific track record capitulating to the whims of corporate capitalists. Whether it will actually make the regulator serve the needs of the public, remains to be seen.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Mayors across the US urge Congress not to repeal clean energy tax credits

    A letter signed by mayors and local leaders across 39 states is calling on Congress to protect all clean energy tax credits made available to state and local governments, which had been responsible for creating thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investments before President Donald Trump froze the funds.

    Those tax credits and the bill that enabled them — the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the Biden administration’s signature climate policy — helped launch 750 clean energy projects credited with creating 400,000 new jobs and over $422 billion in investments. But it drew the ire of the Trump administration. One of Trump’s first acts was signing an executive order pausing funding for programs under the IRA, though the tax credits remain spared, for now, because changing them would require an act of Congress. 

    Republican-led states have benefited the most from the credits, and freezing them will hurt communities across the country, the letter sent to congressional leaders in the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees late Friday warns. 

    “Repeal, rollback, or adjustment of any clean energy incentives will upend countless energy projects and jobs across our country, endangering millions of American jobs, increasing costs for everyday Americans, costing billions in taxpayer dollars, and potentially forcing American jobs overseas,” reads the letter, signed by 133 local leaders representing 25 million Americans across jurisdictions led by both Democrats and Republicans.

    The IRA is the nation’s largest single investment in addressing climate change, allocating billions of dollars via grants, loans, and tax incentives to promote the energy transition away from fossil fuels. The bill passed without a single Republican voting for it and has continued to face partisan attacks, though some Republican members of Congress have come to support it as money began flowing into their communities. According to the letter from local leaders, 85 percent of announced investments and 53 percent of new clean energy jobs stemming from the IRA are in districts represented by Republicans. 

    The 13 tax credits the IRA created for state and local governments have led to the creation of charging stations for electric vehicles, solar installations on government buildings, and more. In just the first year of the tax credits being available, over 500 local governments have taken advantage of them. 

    Kate Gallego, Phoenix’s mayor, said the pause in tax credits has created uncertainty for local governments and businesses regarding the status of funding for various projects. In many cases, the credits come in the form of reimbursements for cities, she said. Phoenix has already placed orders for hybrid-electric buses thanks to the incentives and received a $15 million grant for expanding its EV charging network and addressing the city’s air quality problems. The city is trying to find out if that funding will still be available as city leaders work on the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, she said. 

    Without certainty that the funding will be there, many of the projects can’t move forward. And if the IRA’s tax credits are repealed, it would raise electric bills for Americans across the country by roughly $489 a year as well as cutting jobs, the letter stated. 

    “Whether you care about helping people manage their energy consumption, or American innovation or energy independence for the United States, the clean energy tax credits and direct pay have advanced those agendas,” said Gallego, who is also chair of Climate Mayors, a network of mayors focused on climate action. Many of the letter’s signees are members.

    The tax credits’ uncertain future is one consequence of the Trump administration’s funding freeze across the government, touching off court battles and warnings from experts that the country is in a full-blown constitutional crisis. Federal judges have ruled that the Trump administration cannot pause congressionally approved funds to state and local governments, but agencies are still holding money back. 

    That led a coalition of 22 Democratic state attorneys general to file a motion to enforce the judges’ rulings and a motion for a preliminary injunction in one of the court cases to stop the funding freeze. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must immediately restore all frozen federal funding, a win for the states. 

    “This funding is owed by law to the people of Arizona,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in a statement announcing the legal filing. “Trump can try every trick he has up his sleeve to evade the constitution, but I will be there to stop him.” 

    Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the effect President Trump’s executive order had on clean energy tax credits made available by the Inflation Reduction Act to state and local governments. The tax credits were not paused because changing them would require an act of Congress.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mayors across the US urge Congress not to repeal clean energy tax credits on Feb 16, 2025.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Wyatt Myskow, Inside Climate News.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Georgia was about to retire coal plants. Then came the data centers.

    This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.

    Three years ago, one of the country’s largest electric utilities, Southern Company, made a splash when it announced it would retire most of its coal-fired power plants in the coming years, a major step toward the company’s stated goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. 

    Southern’s subsidiary utilities — the companies that actually run the coal plants to provide electricity to homes and businesses — backed up the announcement by seeking and obtaining approval to close coal plants from the powerful state regulators who oversee them.

    But now the utilities are backtracking. They say they need to meet an extraordinary spike in demand for electricity, mostly from the large facilities packed with computer servers that enable intensive online activity like generative AI and cryptocurrency, known as data centers.

    In its latest integrated resource plan, or IRP, Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power forecasts that demand will go up by 8,200 megawatts (MW) by the winter of 2030-31, more than three times the output of the new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, the first new nuclear reactors in the U.S. in decades, which Georgia Power and other utilities just spent more than $30 billion to build. To meet that growth, the company is requesting a range of resources, including upgrades to existing nuclear plants, more renewable energy, and improvements to the overall power grid — but it’s also asking to extend the life of heavily-polluting coal plants that were previously slated for retirement.

    This move is part of a national trend. The data center industry is booming all over, from Virginia to Texas to Oregon, and utilities across the country are responding by building new fossil fuel resources or delaying retirements, all at a time when scientists agree that cutting fossil fuel emissions is more urgent than ever. More than 9,000 MW of fossil fuel generation slated for closure has been delayed or is at risk of delay, and more than 10,800 MW of new fossil fuel generation has been planned, according to the sustainability research and policy center Frontier Group.

    The backslide into fossil fuels is alarming to environmental and consumer advocates, and not only because it stands to slow down climate action and extend the harmful effects of fossil fuel use. Some also question the purported growth in demand — meaning utilities could be doubling down on climate-warming coal and gas to meet energy demand that won’t actually materialize.

    When Georgia Power requested permission to retire most of its coal plants by 2028, the decision wasn’t directly about reducing emissions. Rather, the utility had deemed the plants “uneconomic” — it would no longer make economic sense to keep running them. A key factor in that calculus was the cost of bringing old plants into compliance with new federal emissions restrictions. The future of that rule is now uncertain. The Supreme Court last fall ordered that the emissions rule could go into effect while legal challenges from states and power companies proceed. As a candidate, President Donald Trump promised to repeal the rule. 

    Regardless of the motive, environmental groups and large companies with their own emissions targets to hit applauded the move to close the coal plants.

    So Southern Environmental Law Center senior attorney Jennifer Whitfield called Georgia Power’s request to renege on some coal closures an “odd choice.”

    “It is not only an expensive and dirty fuel that Georgia Power didn’t even want a couple of years ago for some of these plants, but the data centers don’t want it, either,” she said. “They want clean energy.”

    Though controversial, the proposal to delay coal plant closures isn’t exactly surprising or new. Last year, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a power purchase deal between Georgia Power and its sister company Mississippi Power that will keep a Mississippi coal plant open beyond its planned retirement date. That move, too, was meant to cover rising demand that Georgia Power said came mostly from data centers. Other utilities have proposed delaying coal unit closures in Virginia and West Virginia, according to the Frontier Group analysis.

    Environmental advocates have applauded coal retirements, and are now decrying the reversals, because of the many negative impacts of burning coal to make electricity. Along with airborne pollution that can harm people and contribute to climate change, burning coal creates residual material known as coal ash that poses serious health risks if it seeps into groundwater. Often, the costs of cleaning up and storing coal ash are passed on to customers.

    “Extending the lives of uneconomic coal plants, especially if tied to energy-guzzling data centers, makes no sense when better investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency are clearly available,” said Liz Coyle of consumer advocacy group Georgia Watch. 

    While data centers are certainly not new — computing and the internet require data servers, and our increasingly digital lives demand ever more data processing capacity — the recent explosion has taken utilities and policymakers alike by surprise.

    Georgia Power’s planning is good evidence of that: In 2023, the utility took the unusual step of filing an IRP update in between its regularly-scheduled plans in 2022 and 2025. Georgia Power claimed that demand for energy was increasing so much and so quickly that the company needed to make and buy more power immediately. The purported demand from large data centers popped up so quickly that the utility didn’t foresee it less than two years before and insisted it couldn’t wait another year to address the issue.

    As utilities scramble to meet the data center demand they claim is coming, lawmakers and regulators are also playing rapid catch-up.

    In Georgia, data centers enjoy a sales tax exemption on the high-tech equipment they need to run, which was passed in 2018 and later renewed with little fuss. The state offers many such tax incentives to economic development projects, part of an ongoing effort to remain business-friendly that the governor and other state leaders frequently boast about.

    But in 2024, as Georgia Power’s highly unusual request for more energy shone a spotlight on the enormous energy demands of data centers, the legislature reconsidered. Lawmakers ultimately passed a bill to pause the data center tax break while a study was conducted to evaluate the state’s energy and water resources. Governor Brian Kemp vetoed the bill. This year, the state House of Representatives is forging ahead with the study even as the tax break remains in place and new, large data centers continue to be announced.

    “We want to make sure that we look at how sustainable our energy production is, our energy usage, and certainly our water usage,” House Speaker Jon Burns said when he announced the study committee.

    The Georgia Public Service Commission, meanwhile, has taken steps to address a major concern that came up during the interim IRP. New power generation and transmission infrastructure is expensive, and consumer advocates and the commissioners worried regular customers would end up paying for costs created in the scramble to power data centers. So in January, the commission approved new rules meant to prevent the costs from being passed on to others.  

    These rules, commission chair Jason Shaw said, are just a first step in dealing with a rapidly changing issue.

    “We’ve got to be flexible in terms of keeping an open mind in how we deal with this,” he said. “And we’re also looking at what other states are doing, because Georgia’s growing faster than most but we’re not the only state that’s dealing with this.”

    Policymakers elsewhere are indeed grappling with these same concerns. In Virginia, the state leading the data center boom, lawmakers have introduced a litany of bills on data centers this year, aiming to track their energy and water use, ensure residents and other businesses aren’t subsidizing their energy needs, and assess the impact of new data centers before they’re approved. Legislators in New York and Oregon are working on similar measures.

    Even as lawmakers and regulators reconsider the impacts, data center companies enjoy tax breaks in many states just as they do in Georgia. Data centers receive subsidies of some form in 22 states, according to a recent report by Frontier Group, Environment America, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

    Although the 2025 IRP builds on the trend of skyrocketing demand predictions in other recent filings from Georgia Power and indeed the nationwide trajectory, some consumer advocates are skeptical of the company’s forecasts. Commissioners and advocates questioned the projections closely during hearings last year over Georgia Power’s urgent request for more energy in the 2023 IRP update.

    “It’s not just a math exercise,” Jeffrey Grubb, Georgia Power’s director of resource planning, said of the projections at the time. “It’s based on facts. It’s tangible projects.”

    Still, Public Service Commission staffers tasked with advocating for the public interest sharply criticized how Georgia Power factored those projects into their forecast, arguing the company inflated the probability that the new demand would actually materialize. Experts have also questioned the projections from Georgia Power and other utilities because multiple states are vying to attract the data centers that are driving the demand growth.

    “I think there is a real overestimation of the power requirements throughout the southeast,” Georgia Tech professor and energy expert Marilyn Brown told Grist last year. “[The data center companies are] touring states and they’re asking for the best deal that these states can offer them for clean electricity. So what I’m seeing … it’s like double counting.”

    If a company is considering building a data center in either Georgia or Tennessee, for instance, Brown said utilities in both states may factor in the large energy demands of that potential new customer — even though in reality, only one data center will be built.

    Even within the electric utility industry, demand projections for data centers are uncertain and vary widely, according to the Frontier Group report. One forecast by the Electric Power Research Institute finds data center demand could grow by as little as 29 percent or as much as 166 percent by 2030. The industry forecasts for 2030 cited in the report differ by as much as a staggering 200 terawatt-hours, or 200 million megawatt-hours.

    The same report also points to the risks of inflated projections. In the 1950s and ’60s, it explains, electricity demand grew rapidly amid the postwar economic boom and explosion of new technology. The North American Electric Reliability Council predicted this growth of more than 7 percent a year would continue, and utilities built resources accordingly. But in reality, the boom leveled off. Projects were canceled and utilities defaulted on bonds, according to the report.

    The current moment, the paper argues, could go either way — and depends in large part on a choice as to “whether rapid growth of energy use for technologies such as GenAI and crypto mining are worth the pollution, disruption and costs they impose.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia was about to retire coal plants. Then came the data centers. on Feb 12, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A Progressive Radio Station Purges 2 Elected Board Members

    Two elected members were suspended from the KPFA Local Station Board (LSB) in a closed door session on November 16, 2024. It was a “show trial” that was not for show, not to be seen or even whispered about — a skeleton for the board’s closet, and an insult to the “free speech radio” spirit of KPFA.

    This was a Zoom session, a meeting in cyberspace; twenty two board members attended; four Pacifica National Board directors were here as observers, and there were several technicians and some others, in all, thirty people.  The accused persons were Elizabeth Milos and Steve Zeltzer.  Both were elected to this Local Station Board (LSB) by the listener-subscribers of KPFA, and this hearing should’ve been open to the public — especially since the “Protector” group had already publicized it as a campaign issue.  This closed hearing cannot rightfully be kept secret, and as a board member present at that session, I’m writing this account.

    It wasn’t funny to us who sat through it, but who knows how others may see it. There was irony, unintended humor, and an interesting cast of characters.

    We see a defendant, the indomitable Elizabeth Milos and others in action.  The session opens with Elizabeth challenging Christina Huggins, first about the audio recording.  Christina said there wasn’t going to be any audio recording; Elizabeth told her we’d then record it ourselves, which we did, or I did anyway, and from it made a transcription.  Christina said we didn’t have her permission, and Elizabeth then challenged Christina’s eligibility to chair the session.

    “The chair of the LSB is not going to be present?” said Elizabeth Milos. “So who is acting chair?”

    “I am the chair for this meeting,” replied Christina Huggins.

    “You’re not a member of the board,” Elizabeth reminded her.  “You can not–”

    And Christina muted her.  This being a Zoom meeting, the person who runs the meeting can press a mute button and silence board members.

    Elizabeth Milos unmuted herself. “You’re not a delegate. To be able to preside over this kind of –”

    Christina Huggins muted her again and said. “The chair does not have to be a delegate, per the bylaws.”

    “The ones who don’t have to be a delegate are the treasurer and the secretary, but the chair does,” Elizabeth explained, referring to Article Seven, Local Station Boards, Section 5.

    “You will be removed from the room if you do not come to order,” Christina warned.

    Steve Zeltzer spoke up “You’re not a delegate, Christina.”

    You will be removed as well. I’m the chair.  The chair does not have to be a delegate.”

    “Show us in writing where it says the chair does not have to be a delegate,” said Cheryl Davila.

    Christina Huggins overruled them and presided as the self-appointed chair.

    Christina Huggins is a leader of the “PROTECTORS” group — the “Huggins Faction” — which, on KPFA’s Local Station Board (LSB), represents the station’s power clique and management. Although Huggins was a former board member, and was again elected for a term beginning in December 2024, she was not a delegate at the time of this session.  Her group has a 2/3rds majority which enables them to set the agenda, and this was what they set for this day in November 2024.  So we see the majority putting two members of the minority on trial, a “disciplinary hearing,” Christina Huggins called it.

    Defendant Elizabeth Milos is a Chilean-American, a Spanish/English medical interpreter in her day job.  She’s also a labor and human rights activist.  Her co-defendant Steve Zeltzer is the host of Work Week Radio.  Both are affiliated with the RESCUE PACIFICA group, which advocates keeping the Pacifica network intact and preserving its seventy-five year antiwar tradition.

    The “trial” was ostensibly about an incident on July 31, 2024, where the defendants, Elizabeth Milos and Steve Zeltzer, held a speak-out in front of the KPFA studio in Berkeley.  KPFA’s Business Manager Maria Negret came out of the building and angrily confronted them.  Steve Zeltzer inadvertently touched Maria Negret’s hand — hence a charge of “assault and battery.”

    “He’s lucky he didn’t do it to me,” growled board member Fred Dodsworth, who played the role of “Prosecutor.”  Fred describes himself as “Loud and Proud,” and he certainly is loud, egotistical, and takes himself very, very seriously. Fred Dodsworth was perfectly cast for a leading role in this sort of thing. His mission was to seek justice for the supposed “victim,” Business Manager Maria Negret — who was not present.

    Steve Zeltzer and Elizabeth Milos had requested that Maria Negret be there as a witness.  And Jim Lafferty, attorney for the defendants, asked why Maria was not present at this hearing?

    “She’s not the accuser,” said Christina Huggins, the self-appointed chair.

    “But she filed a police complaint,” the defense attorney reminded the chair. “She filed a police complaint of assault and battery, which is a charge against one of these people.  And yet, she’s not relevant for today?”

    The chair seemed unable to give a satisfactory  explanation for Maria’s absence.  It appeared that Maria Negret did not wish to accuse Steve Zeltzer in a hearing where she could be cross examined.

    There was a police report, and Dodsworth flashed it on the screen.  But only the seal of the Berkeley Police Department was seen.  The contents could not be shown, because, Dodsworth told the hearing, “The actual police report stipulates that it is not for distribution.”

    Not for distribution?  Strange.  We had obtained a copy of the police report — presumably the same one mentioned by Dodsworth.  It did not even contain the name of the suspect or a description of the “assault.”

    What Dodsworth did have was a video of the July 31st incident.  But it was actually more embarrassing to Maria Negret than to Steve and Elizabeth.  In it we see Maria with her hands on her hips, aggressively yelling and scolding.  And the assault?  The video doesn’t show it, not until you slow it down to frame by frame, and finally there is a frame where for a microsecond Steve touches Maria’s hand.  That was the evidence of the supposed “assault and battery” on which Dodsworth based his case.

    “Yeah, we’ve been told this was an assault and battery,” said board member Anthony Fest.  “If this really was an assault, why didn’t you contact the DA’s office and request that they prosecute Steve Zeltzer?  Most likely because you wouldn’t want to be laughed at — a fraction of a second of inadvertent contact when the business manager was actually the initiator of the confrontation.”

    “If this is assault and battery, then every time I’ve gotten on BART at rush hour, I’ve been assaulted and battered,” said another LSB member, James McFadden. “I was most amused by the prosecutor’s comment that if Zeltzer had done that to him, he would have –, and then didn’t finish his sentence.  He would have what?  Assaulted and battered Zeltzer?”

    Undaunted, “Prosecutor” Dodsworth bravely and resolutely launched into presenting his case.  This was Fred Dodsworth’s hour upon the stage, and all eyes were on him as he spoke:

    “The evidence against Mr. Zeltzer is undeniable.  You saw it with your own eyes. . . . This was no accidental contact. This was no inadvertent brush. This was an attempt to wrest control of her body from herself.”

    And reminding us that Maria Negret is a Latina, Dodsworth added, with righteous indignation, “There’s additional significance when this action is taken against a woman of color.”

    “Excuse me,” Elizabeth Milos interrupted him. “There’s a point of order.”

    And this is where we learned that while presenting his case against Steve Zeltzer, Prosecutor Dodsworth had kicked delegate Cheryl Davila — the only black woman in this Zoom session — out of the meeting.

    “I’m talking. Shut up!” Dodsworth barked.

    The not easily silenced Elizabeth Milos spoke again, “One of our members, Cheryl Davila is not being allowed in.”

    “You’re out of order!” the self-appointed chair upheld the prosecutor.

    Prosecutor Dodsworth continued his speech, explaining that to excuse Steve Zeltzer “would be a betrayal of the values we stand for and erode that trust KPFA has built within staff and community, particularly among women and people of color.”

    Elizabeth Milos and Steve Zeltzer continued to raise their voices. “Cheryl Davila, who is a black, the only black board member of the KPFA Local Station Board, has been excluded!” Steve said.

    “You’re out of order, Mr. Zeltzer,” said the self-appointed chair.

    Eventually Cheryl Davila was readmitted to the meeting. After returning, Cheryl said: “Dodsworth has disrespected me on numerous occasions . . ., and today I was kicked out of the meeting. Wasn’t let back in for some time. I don’t even know why I was kicked out.  . . . It is a kangaroo court.  You guys make the rules, and we have to go by them.”

    Unlike courtroom dramas and other events that take place in a physical room or hall, this was a Zoom session where everyone except the speaker is muted, and laughter, gasps, jeers, boos, and applause were not heard.  But the attending board members were allowed brief comments.

    Since Dodsworth was making such an issue of respect for KPFA employees and staff, particularly those of color, Donna Carter and I reminded him of the time he wrongfully criticized KPFA journalist Frank Sterling who was arrested by the Antioch police.  Frank Sterling is a Native American; he won his case, and a financial settlement from the police.

    Pausing in his prosecution, Fred Dodsworth took time to reiterate his attack on the KPFA journalist.  “Mr. Sterling did not behave as a reporter,” said Dodsworth.  “He behaved as an activist.”

    Frank Sterling had stepped in to prevent a woman from being beaten.  Many journalists have done that in various ways. Amy Goodman, Gary Webb, Norman Solomon, among them. Frank Sterling is a journalist and he is an activist. That is very much in the KPFA tradition.

    Defense Attorney Jim Lafferty said this earlier in this session, but it fits here: “Having been a long time admirer of this radio station, to be present at this, … and to observe it taking place is truly sad to me. It has no resemblance to due process. An Alice in Wonderland trial would be an improvement… This hearing is … a shamefully obvious political move on the part of a majority of this board, to get rid of some people whose opinions annoy them.”

    The opinions of Steve Zeltzer and Elizabeth Milos were indeed annoying to the “Protector” group.  Steve told the hearing;

    “The [July 31st event] was about the monitorship of Pacifica. And this monitorship was brought about actually because members of this KPFA Station Board went to the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] and called on the FCC to take away the license of WBAI. Now I think that’s a betrayal of the interests of Pacifica.

    “They did that. They continue to support that.  And now that monitorship means that a new FCC Chairman appointed by the President Trump could immediately shut down Pacifica because it’s already under monitorship.”

    How the Trump Administration may handle the monitorship (“Consent Decree”) remains to be seen.  But there are also other threats on the horizon. Congress is currently working on bipartisan legislation to crack down on alternative media.

    Co-defendant Elizabeth Milos, the only witness of the July 31 incident present at this hearing, was charged with two offenses.  The first was: “making inaccurate statements in a public meeting about the alleged assault and battery.”

    Elizabeth Milos had publicly refuted the accusation.  And now at this hearing Elizabeth said, “The video proves the fact that it was not [Steve Zeltzer’s] intention to grab anybody.” Thus, by disputing Fred Dodsworth’s dubious version, Elizabeth had, in Dodsworth’s view, obviously committed a truly heinous offense.

    The second charge went to the heart of the matter.  Elizabeth had criticized the station’s Business Manager Maria Negret.  That is, Elizabeth had found documents showing that during a lawsuit by former Pacifica Executive Director John Vernile against the Pacifica Foundation, Maria Negret presented a deposition on behalf of the opposing side.  And Christina Huggins had shared confidential information with the opposing counsel.  That lawsuit cost KPFA $305,000.

    “I have been involved in exposing this fraud.” Elizabeth Milos told the hearing that she’d shown Maria Negret’s publicly available deposition.  “That would most likely be part of the reason why I’m being silenced,” Elizabeth said, and added, “I again object for the record that your Christina Huggins is not [currently] a delegate and also has serious conflict of interest.”

    Prosecutor Dodsworth didn’t actually dispute Elizabeth’s allegations against Maria Negret and Christina Huggins. He and Huggins only stipulated that such matters should be discussed in only closed sessions of the LSB.  Well, they had a point there.  The board should be able to discuss and resolve personnel issues in executive sessions.  Unfortunately, it’s impossible to discuss such issues with this board dominated by the offenders — the “Protector” group.  Only one point of view is allowed.

    And that leads directly to what this “trial” was really about — the role of the Local Station Board. The Rescue Pacifica group, with which Elizabeth and Steve are affiliated, assert that there are times when board members need to ask questions.  The above mentioned issues should concern the LSB.  Another example, one from January 2020: when it was discovered that property taxes hadn’t been paid on the KPFA’s studio for six years, and the Alameda County tax office was about to seize the building and auction it off to collect the unpaid taxes, it was proper for the board to be asking the station’s general manager how that happened.  In fact, according to Pacifica Bylaws, the LSB is required to do a yearly evaluation of the station’s manager, but that hasn’t been done for over seven years now. The “Protector” group, who have a board majority, have prevented those evaluations.

    The “Protector” group sees it as its job to protect the station’s management from the embarrassing questions that the Rescue Pacifica people ask. Protector Sherry Gendelman said at this hearing: “Oversight of employees is not the role of the LSB.”

    “We should not interfere with the operation or the employees at the station at any time,” Gendelman stated specifically. Which is a an interesting comment coming from the person who petitioned the FCC to investigate WBAI, the Pacifica station in New York.  Before that “Protectors” were involved in the month-long takeover of the NY station in 2019.  There certainly are problems at WBAI, but the Protectors’ “solutions” have done more to sabotage than to help the New York station.

    The differences between the two groups do seem irreconcilable.  Rescue Pacifica struggles to preserve the network and its antiwar programming, while the Protectors group supports a management clique that gives nine hours of KPFA’s airtime each week to Ian Masters, a show host who attacked Mumia Abu Jamal, and who promotes a pro-military vision for our country.  This struggle has gone on for years, with people looking to find common ground — which is hard to find.

    In the midst of this day’s turmoil, Defense Attorney Jim Lafferty, who is a former general manager of KPFK in Los Angeles, expressed a plea for unity and warned of the danger:

    “One of the reasons why I’m so utterly appalled by having to be here today is because Pacific has enemies!”  For God’s sakes, not Steve and Elizabeth!  No, our enemies. My enemies, your enemies. . . . They are, of course, those who are about to rule this country — who in Project 2025 spell out that they want to shut down this entire network. And yet, here we sit, doing what we’re doing today,” Jim Lafferty said.  “Have we all lost our minds?”

    “Well, I simply want to then say that I plead with all of us to remember that we’re comrades,” Jim Lafferty continued.  “And that we please can get back to the business that we should be at, because otherwise the bright future of this station is going to be removed from us.  In fact, the whole damn thing is going to be removed!”

    Two of  the “Protectors” broke ranks and voted against the suspension, but we don’t know who they were, because the ballots — like everything else in the meeting — were secret.  And there were two Protectors who did not attend this session.  Nevertheless, Dodsworth, Huggins and their crew still had a simple majority which found Elizabeth Milos and Steve Zeltzer “guilty” of all charges and suspended them from the LSB for eighteen months.  (To fully remove them from the board would’ve required a 2/3rds vote.)

    What we saw that November day was a power grab, rather crude and even clumsy, but nevertheless very effective. Board members elected by the listeners were removed by the majority faction.  Who’s next?  It could be anyone who raises uncomfortable issues.  It’s sad and discouraging to see this happening at KPFA 94.1 FM, which for so many years has been a source of information, music, inspiration, encouragement and sense of community.

    But what does this mean for KPFA listeners who may not take much interest in the details of board politics?

    Just this: the ones who run the show are the ones who determine the programming.  While many excellent shows remain, in recent years we’ve seen a drift towards echoing the corporate media and security state propaganda, promoting or at least soft peddling empire’s talking points.

    While following events in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere, we need to watch and take care of what’s happening under our noses, on the air and in the cyberspace where we live, at our community radio station.

    *****
    The quotations in the above account are from a transcript of the KPFA LSB executive session of Nov 16, 2024.  It’s long, but I strongly recommend reading it.

    The post A Progressive Radio Station Purges 2 Elected Board Members first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • North Carolina launches first-ever statewide electrification incentives

    As temperatures dipped well below freezing last month in Asheville, North Carolina, the heat pumps at Sophie Mullinax’s house hummed along, keeping up just fine.

    The fact she was warm inside without a gas furnace while the outdoor temperature read 9 degrees Fahrenheit reaffirmed a core belief: ​“Electrification is better in almost every way you slice it.”

    Mullinax is chief operating officer for Solar CrowdSource, a platform that connects groups of customers with solar panels and electric appliances. Since last spring, the company has been preparing for North Carolina’s first-ever statewide incentives for switching out gas stoves and heaters for high-efficiency electric versions.

    The Energy Saver North Carolina program, launched in mid-January, includes more than $208 million dollars in federally funded rebates to help low- and moderate-income homeowners make energy-saving improvements, including converting to electric appliances.

    “The electric counterpart to every single fossil-fuel technology out there does the same job better,” Mullinax said, and ​“has a lower impact on the climate, is healthier, and often saves money.”

    Solar CrowdSource, which has partnered with the city of Asheville and Buncombe County to help meet the community’s climate goals through electrification, expects the rebate program to make its task easier.

    Still, questions remain about the federally funded inducements, including — perhaps most urgently — whether they can survive President Donald Trump’s unilateral assault on clean energy.

    ‘The largest and the first’

    The state’s new incentive program stems from the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 federal climate law that unleashed nearly $400 billion in federal spending on clean energy and efficiency — and which is now embattled by a flurry of Trump edicts.

    While much of the climate law directs incentives to large, utility-scale wind and solar projects, the $8.8 billion home-rebate program is designed to curb planet-warming emissions house-by-house, where there is vast potential for improving efficiency and shifting to electric appliances.

    Studies estimate that roughly 35 percent of home energy use is wasted — lost to inefficient heating and cooling systems and appliances, air leaks around windows and doors, and poorly insulated walls. That’s especially true in states like North Carolina, where building energy conservation codes are woefully outdated.

    While homes in North Carolina rely less on fossil fuel appliances than in other parts of the country, they still contribute to climate change. About a third are heated with fuels other than electricity, per the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the Energy Information Administration, some 15 percent use gas for cooking. In all, state officials estimate that households that burn gas, propane, and other fuels account for 5 percent of the state’s net greenhouse gas pollution.

    Both energy waste and the rising cost of fossil fuels — whether burned directly in the home or in Duke Energy power plants — contribute to the state’s energy burden. Some 1.4 million North Carolinians pay a disproportionately high fraction of their income on energy bills, according to the state’s latest Clean Energy Plan.

    But though the state has long deployed federal weatherization assistance to its lowest-income households, there’s little precedent here for a widespread nudge to electrification, either through carrots or sticks.

    Unlike dozens of municipalities around the country, no local government in North Carolina has moved to limit residential hookups for gas; most legal analysts say they lack the power to do so. In 2023, the state legislature made doubly sure of that with a law banning local bans on new gas appliances or connections.

    Meanwhile, a decades-old state rule barring ratepayer-funded utility promotions that could influence fuel choice has prevented Duke from offering much in the way of carrots. While shareholders could pay for rebates, they have little motive to do so: Duke acquired Piedmont Natural Gas, the state’s predominant gas utility, in 2016.

    For years, Duke has offered incentives, carefully calibrated not to run afoul of state rules, for builders to construct more efficient homes. The latest iteration of those ratepayer-backed inducements is under $2,000 per home. By contrast, the new statewide rebates for upgrading to electric appliances cap out at $14,000 apiece.

    “This is the largest and the first program in the state that is truly incentivizing fuel switching,” said Ethan Blumenthal, regulatory counsel at the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association.

    A second program within Energy Saver North Carolina offers rebates of up to $16,000 to homeowners who add insulation, plug air leaks, and make other improvements, so long as an audit shows the measures will reduce energy use by at least 20 percent.

    In both cases, North Carolina officials are aiming the incentives at low- and moderate-income households. Those earning less than 80 percent of the area’s median income — about $70,000, depending on the county — get projects for free, and those earning up to 150 percent of the median get a 50 percent rebate.

    “That was a choice. The federal government did not require it to be a specifically low- to moderate-income program,” said Claire Williamson, energy policy advocate at the North Carolina Justice Center. Yet, she added, the administrations of former governor Roy Cooper and current governor Josh Stein have ​“made sure that these funds are going to people who need them the most.”

    ‘Very optimistic about this program’

    Like Solar CrowdSource, the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters has awaited the new rebates for months. Meech Carter, clean energy campaigns director at the group, has been handing out flyers, holding information sessions with legislators and community leaders, and setting up an online clearinghouse for homeowners to explore available incentives.

    “Every time I present on the website and what resources are out there, I get so many questions on the rebate program,” Carter said, ​“especially for replacing gas appliances, propane heaters, and transitioning folks to cleaner sources and more energy-efficient sources.”

    Costs and climate concerns are factors, she said, but so is health. Just like fossil fuel–burning power plants and cars, gas stoves and furnaces emit soot and smog-forming particles. A growing body of evidence shows that these pollutants get trapped indoors and far exceed levels deemed safe.

    Now that the rebate program has launched, Carter has dozens of people statewide to call back and assist, including 25 in Edgecombe County’s Princeville, the oldest town in the country chartered by Black Americans.

    Edgecombe is among the state’s most impoverished counties, making it a prime candidate for the new rebates. ​“Considering North Carolina’s energy landscape,” Carter said, ​“we are very optimistic about this program.”

    ‘Continuous improvement’

    Yet even champions for the program acknowledge they have questions about its deployment. Despite the immense need, it’s hard enough to expend weatherization assistance money due to distrust in government programs, a dearth of qualified contractors, and other hurdles. Those funds, intended for the state’s lowest-income households, total roughly $38 million per year at the moment, after a big infusion from Congress, according to state officials. The new rebates, if evenly distributed over five years, would more than double that with another $41.6 million annually.

    “This is larger than the weatherization assistance program,” said Williamson. ​“There are many contractors out there, but I think there is going to be a big lift to get people trained.”

    Announcing the program last month, Governor Stein stressed that new contractors and other workers would follow.

    “[The Department of Environmental Quality] estimates that the program will support over 2,000 jobs across our state,” Stein said at the launch event. ​“I’m also eager to see the workforce development opportunities that will come.”

    Asked how historically disadvantaged communities could benefit from such opportunities, department spokesperson Sascha Medina said over email, ​“We have planned this program to launch and ramp up for continuous improvement. We will be focusing our marketing to contractors in high energy burden and storm impacted areas first and will expand from there.”

    Still, the counties most devastated by Hurricane Helene, like Buncombe, aren’t first on the program’s outreach list. The department’s analysis of statewide energy burdens led it to choose Halifax County in the eastern part of the state along with Cleveland County, in the foothills.

    “The hurricane-affected areas add a layer of complexity to the program, because the rebate programs cannot duplicate money that has been awarded to households through other recovery funding sources,” Medina said. ​“As we roll out the program, we will continue to work with our partners in the affected areas and receive guidance from the U.S. Department of Energy.”

    That guidance from a Trump-led Department of Energy could imperil the success of the rebates more than any other factor. While the president rescinded his widely panned memo halting virtually all federal government spending, his first-week orders targeting Biden-era clean energy spending appear to remain in force.

    The fact that the federal government signed contracts with the state in accordance with a law passed by Congress should shield North Carolina’s Energy Saver rebate program from harm, Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Reid Wilson said at the launch.

    “This is finalized. This is done,” Wilson said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline North Carolina launches first-ever statewide electrification incentives on Feb 8, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • 2 obscure clean energy metals are caught in the crosshairs of the US-China trade war

    In the summer of 2023, Vasileios Tsianos, the vice president of corporate development at Neo Performance Materials, started getting calls from government officials on both sides of the Atlantic. Within the world of industrial material manufacturing, Neo is best known for making rare earth magnets, used in everything from home appliances to electric vehicles. But these calls weren’t about rare earths. They were about something considerably rarer: the metal gallium.

    Neo recycles a few dozen tons of high-purity gallium a year, mostly from semiconductor chip manufacturing scrap, at a factory in Ontario, Canada. In North America, it’s the only industrial-scale producer of the metal, which is used in not only chips, but also clean energy technologies and military equipment. 

    China, the world’s leading producer by far, had just announced new export controls on gallium, apparently in response to reports that the United States government was considering restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China. 

    All of a sudden, people wanted to talk to Neo. “We’ve spoken to almost everyone” interested in producing gallium outside of China, Tsianos told Grist.

    Since Tsianos started receiving those calls, tensions over the 31st element on the periodic table — as well as the 32nd, germanium, also used in a bevy of advanced technologies — have escalated. In December, China outright banned exports of both metals to the United States following the Biden administration’s decision to further restrict U.S. chip exports. 

    Now, several companies operating in the U.S. and Canada are considering expanding production of the rare metals to help meet U.S. demand. While Canadian critical minerals producers may get swept up in a new geopolitical tit-for-tat should Trump go through with his threat to impose tariffs, U.S. metal producers could see support from the new administration, which called for prioritizing federal funding for critical minerals projects in a Day 1 executive order. Beyond the U.S. and Canada, industry observers say China’s export ban is fueling global interest in making critical mineral supply chains more diverse so that no single country has a chokehold over materials vital for a high-tech, clean energy future.

    “This latest round of export bans are putting a lot of wind in the sails of critical minerals supply chain efforts, not just in the U.S. but globally,” Seaver Wang of the Breakthrough Institute, a research center focused on technological solutions to environmental problems, told Grist.

    Gallium and germanium aren’t exactly household names. But they are found in products that are indispensable to modern life — and a fossil fuel-free society. With its impressive electrical properties, gallium is used in semiconductor chips that make their way into everything from cell phones to power converters in electric vehicles to LED lighting displays. The metal is also used in the manufacturing of rare earth magnets for electric vehicles and wind turbines, in thin film solar cells, and sometimes, in commercially popular silicon solar photovoltaic cells, where it can help increase performance and extend lifespan. 

    A close-up of two, side-by-side, black solar panel arrays against a cloudy sky
    Gallium is sometimes used in silicon solar photovoltaic cells, where it can help increase performance and extend lifespan. Baris Seckin / Anadolu via Getty Images

    Germanium, meanwhile, is used to refract light inside fiber optic cables. In addition to helping form the backbone of the internet, the metal’s exceptional light-scattering properties make it useful for infrared lenses, semiconductor chips, and high-efficiency solar cells used by satellites.

    There aren’t many substitutes for these two elements.  Some silicon-based semiconductors lack gallium, and specialized glasses can be substituted for germanium in certain infrared technologies. Solar cells are often doped with boron instead of gallium. But these two metals have specific properties that often make them the ideal material. When it comes to clean energy, Tsianos told Grist, there are no substitutes “within the material performance and cost trade-off spectrum” offered by gallium.

    Because a little bit goes a long way, the market for both metals is small — and it’s dominated by China. In 2022, the world produced about 640 tons of low-purity gallium and a little over 200 tons of germanium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In recent years, China has accounted for virtually all of the world’s low-purity gallium output and more than half of refined germanium. 

    That’s partly due to the fact that both metals are byproducts of other industries. Gallium is typically extracted from bauxite ores as they are being processed to make aluminum oxide, while zinc miners sometimes squeeze germanium out of waste produced during refining. China is a leading producer of these common metals, too — and its government has made co-extracting gallium and germanium a priority, according to Wang. “It is very strategic,” he said.

    China’s dominance of the two metals’ supply chains gives it a considerable cudgel in its ongoing trade war with the U.S. America produces no virgin gallium and only a small amount of germanium, while consuming approximately fifty tons a year of the two metals combined. A U.S. Geological Survey study published in November found that if China implemented a total moratorium on exports of both metals, it could cost the U.S. economy billions. Weeks after that study was published, China announced its ban.

    The ban is so new that it’s not yet clear how U.S. companies, or the federal government, are responding. But America’s high-tech manufacturing sector isn’t without fallback options. North of the border, Neo’s facility in Ontario stands ready to double its production of gallium, according to Tsianos. “We have the capacity,” he told Grist. “We’re waiting for more feedstock.” 

    Currently, Neo’s only source of gallium is the semiconductor industry. Chip makers in Europe, North America, and Asia send the company their scrap, which it processes to recover high-purity gallium that feeds back into semiconductor manufacturing. But Tsianos says Neo is piloting its technology with bauxite miners around the world to create new sources of virgin gallium. The idea, he says, is that bauxite miners would do some initial processing on-site, then send low-purity gallium to Neo for further refining in Canada. Tsianos declined to name specific bauxite firms Neo is partnering with, but said the company is “making progress” toward making new resources available.

    Meanwhile, in British Columbia, mining giant Teck Resources is already a leading producer of germanium outside of China. The firm’s Trail Operations refinery complex receives zinc ore from the Red Dog mine in northwest Alaska and turns it into various products, including around 20 tons of refined germanium a year, according to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate. (Teck doesn’t disclose production volumes.) 

    That germanium is sold primarily to customers in the U.S., Teck spokesperson Dale Steeves told Grist. In wake of the export ban, Steeves said that the firm is now “examining options and market support for increasing production capacity of germanium.”

    Two metallic cylinders sit on a blue and white table in front of laboratory equipment
    Germanium substrates wafers at a Umicore facility in Olen, Belgium. Umicore

    Kwasi Ampofo, the head of metals and mining at the clean energy research firm BloombergNEF, told Grist that in the near term, he would expect the U.S. to “try to establish new supply chain relationships” with countries that already have significant production, like Canada, to secure the gallium and germanium it needs. That may be true whether or not Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canadian imports become reality. Tsianos was bullish in spite of the tariff threat, noting in an email that Neo “remains the only industrial-scale and commercially-operating Gallium facility in North America.”

    “[W]e are committed to continue serving our European, American, and Japanese customers in the semiconductor and renewable energy industries,’ Tsianos added.

    Steeves told Grist that a trade war between the U.S. and Canada would be “a negative for the economy of both nations, disrupting the flow of essential critical minerals and increasing costs and inefficiencies on both sides of the border.” Teck, he said,  “will continue to actively manage our sales arrangements to minimize the impact to Trail Operations.”

    While Canada may be the U.S.’s best short-term option for these rare metals, farther down the line Ampofo expects to see the U.S. take a  “renewed interest” in recycling — particularly of military equipment. In 2022, the Department of Defense announced it had initiated a program for recovering “optical-grade germanium” from old military equipment. At the time, the initiative was expected to recycle up to 3 tons of the metal each year, or roughly 10 percent of the nation’s annual demand. The Defense sub-agency responsible for the program didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on the program’s status.

    There’s another small source of production capacity in the U.S. The global metals company Umicore recycles germanium from manufacturing scrap, fiber optic cables, solar cells, and infrared optical devices at an optical materials facility in Quapaw, Oklahoma, as well as in Belgium. The company has been recycling germanium since the 1950s, a spokesperson told Grist, calling it a “core and historical activity at Umicore.” Umicore declined to disclose how much of the metal it recycles and wouldn’t say whether China’s export ban will impact this part of its business.

    While recycling is able to fill some of the nation’s gallium and germanium needs, there may be a larger source of both metals lurking in sludge ponds in central Tennessee. 

    There, in the city of Clarksville, the Netherlands-headquartered Nyrstar operates a zinc processing facility that produces wastes containing gallium and germanium. A U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson told Grist that the company has previously partnered with Ames National Laboratory’s Critical Materials Innovation Hub to develop processes for extracting gallium, which isn’t typically produced from zinc waste. 

    A silvery industrial facility is seen behind some shrubs and a road, with wispy clouds in a blue sky in the background
    Nyrstar’s zinc processing facility in Clarksville, Tennessee, which produces wastes containing gallium and germanium. Nyrstar

    In 2023, Nyrstar announced plans to build a new, $150-million facility, co-located with its existing zinc smelter in Clarksville, capable of producing 30 tons of germanium and 40 tons of gallium a year. However, the current status of the project is uncertain, with no timetable to begin construction. A spokesperson for Nyrstar told Grist the company is “continu[ing] to work on and evaluate the business case” for the facility, while declining to offer additional details.

    Making a business case to produce gallium or germanium is the central challenge for firms outside of China, experts told Grist. As Tsianos of Neo put it, these metals are a “side hustle” that requires major up-front investment for a relatively small amount of extra revenue. Moreover, a bauxite or zinc miner’s ability to produce gallium or germanium typically hinges on the market conditions for the metal it is primarily focused on. That means “if aluminum prices are low or the zinc prices are low, the mine or the smelter might just not operate, even if the world is sort of screaming out for more gallium or germanium,” Wang said.

    Still, there’s more economic incentive to produce these metals now than there was a few years ago. The recent geopolitical drama, Tsianos says, has caused a “bifurcation” in the price of gallium. Outside of China, the price of the metal is now “almost double” what it is within the nation’s borders. 

    “There’s a structural change in the market that has created a business case for outside of China production,” Tsianos said. “And it started because of the export control.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 2 obscure clean energy metals are caught in the crosshairs of the US-China trade war on Feb 7, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The odds are Illinois won’t hit its 2030 climate goals

    This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.

    Four years ago, Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed the Climate Equitable Jobs Act, an ambitious suite of overlapping goals and deadlines to put Illinois on track to overhaul its economy by 2030: decarbonizing the power sector, propping up electric vehicles, and fast-tracking a clean energy workforce. 

    Now, with five years left until several deadlines are due — and a presidential administration that doesn’t believe in climate change — the clock is ticking. As climate action shifts more to the local level, states have to figure out both how to fill the void left by the federal government and how to hit targets that now seem likely out of reach. 

    Illinois isn’t the only state to set hard-to-hit goals and come up short. States such as California, New York, and Oregon are playing a similar game of catch-up. That doesn’t come as a surprise to Jackson Morris of the national nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, who added that it shouldn’t be a death knell for climate initiatives either.  

    “[The] momentum at the state level, particularly now with what’s going on in Washington, is really where the action is,” said Morris. “ We want to push as hard as we can to meet as many of those targets as we can, even if they happen a year or two years after — the important thing is that we’re on that long term trajectory.” 

    Illinois came face-to-face with one of its renewable energy targets this year and came up short, according to John Delurey, with the national advocacy organization Vote Solar.

    Before the Climate Equitable Jobs Act, known as CEJA, the state had committed to relying on renewable sources for a quarter of its energy by 2025, Delurey said. But as of 2023, renewable energy only made up about 13.5 percent of electricity generation in Illinois. That figure needs to more than double over five years to catch up with CEJA’s impending deadlines.  

    CEJA increased Illinois’ renewable portfolio standard — a policy that requires that a certain share of the energy sold by electric utilities comes from renewable sources — to 40 percent clean energy by 2030, to 50 percent clean energy by 2040, and to 100 percent by 2050.

    “We have a long journey ahead and a short time to get there,” Delurey said. “But I don’t know that it’s a foregone conclusion that we will miss our 2030 CEJA goals.”

    In Illinois and across the country, the installation of wind projects has slowed substantially compared to solar, which has soared, particularly with the help of tax credits from former president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. That’s increasingly a problem in Illinois, where over 90 percent of the state’s renewable generation comes from wind. 

    Wind has tapered off locally, according to Delurey, due to issues with increased local opposition around where renewables can be installed. 

    “At the peak, about 15 counties in the windiest part of Illinois had effectively banned wind projects,” he said. That was before Illinois passed a 2023 bill to limit what local governments could do to restrict wind and solar.

    A recent report from the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council found that regional grid operators are moving too slowly to keep pace with massive expansion of renewables. As a result, renewable energy projects have been stuck on a waiting list for years before they come online.

    Still, Brian Granahan, director of the Illinois Power Agency, which brokers electricity between customers and utilities, said the state has made significant progress toward its 2030 target of 40 percent clean energy.

    “In terms of the contracts that have been awarded through our programs and procurements, we’re at 19 percent right now,” Granahan said. That figure, however, includes clean energy projects active today and those that are still under development. 

    Granahan said that Illinois is about halfway to its 2030 deadline. 

    “The question is, Over the remaining five years, can we award enough contracts to make up the remaining 20 percent to ensure that we’re making up the other half,” he said. 

    It’s not just renewable energy targets that are lagging. So are plans for EV and clean energy workforce training.

    The state’s landmark climate legislation set a target of 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030. To date, only about 100,000 EVs have been added in Illinois since Pritzker signed CEJA. 

    The state isn’t doing enough to close that gap, according to Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs at Respiratory Health Association, a Chicago-based public health nonprofit.

    “There’s not a lot of detail in terms of year-by-year goals,” he said. “It was just a big goal that we’re going to reach by this date.”

    The centerpiece of the plan was a $4,000 rebate for Illinois customers with the purchase of a new or used EV, which could be stacked on existing federal tax credits. 

    However, funding for the rebate program has been insufficient to meet demand each year since launch. The program’s funding fluctuates, depending on how much Illinois lawmakers set aside for it. Funding for fiscal year 2025 is down to $14 million from a one-time high of $20 million in 2023. This year’s rebate program will only provide payouts for approximately 3,500 EV purchases. That’s not enough, Urbaszewski says

    Today, more than 7 million passenger vehicles run in Illinois, the vast majority gas-powered. That means that even if the state adds a further 900,000 EVs on its roads by 2030, the result would still be relatively “modest,” according to Urbaszewski, as only a sliver of total passenger vehicles would be zero-emission.

    The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency declined a request for an interview and did not return a request for comment.

    Still, there is a glimmer of success.

    After a yearslong wait, the state is finally delivering on its promise to build out workforce training for clean jobs. Illinois has committed to $80 million annually to rapidly expand training and certification programs, with an emphasis on Black and Latino communities most affected by pollution from fossil fuels.

    As part of that effort, the state established 16 community-run workforce hubs across the state. Their purpose is to provide entry-level training relating to green-economy careers. To date,  there’s already been 15 graduates, and more than a hundred students are currently enrolled. 

    It took time to build up the capacity to get these programs operational, according to Francisco Lopez Zavala, a policy expert with The Illinois Environmental Council, an umbrella organization that advances environmental policy statewide. 

    “We’re trying to ensure it is done in a way that’s equitable to our communities across the state, and is done right by our communities,” said Lopez Zavala. “It takes time to do right by them.”

    As the 2030 deadlines approach, it’s becoming clear that states like Illinois may miss the mark. From the NRDC’s Jackson Morris’ perspective, that’s not necessarily a failure. 

    “We always knew that the path to a net zero economy by 2050 was not going to be linear,” said Morris. “There are going to be years where you make more progress and years where you flatline. It’s going to be lumpy.”

    Between President Donald Trump’s recent withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions and a slew of executive orders to stall renewables, state-led decarbonization efforts — even if they are behind schedule — may soon be the only large-scale greenhouse gas-slashing strategies left in the United States. 

    “I’d rather see states take shots from half-court and try to make them,” he said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The odds are Illinois won’t hit its 2030 climate goals on Feb 7, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Colorado and Connecticut saved residents hundreds of thousands of dollars on their utility bills

    People across the U.S. receiving rising utility bills aren’t just paying for the costs of gas and electricity: They could also be paying for corporate lobbying and advertising. 

    Electric and gas utilities routinely charge ratepayers for costs related to political advocacy, ads to burnish their brand, and even luxury perks for executives and employees, according to a recent report by the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute, or EPI. Such expenses add up to millions of dollars paid by customers toward utilities’ efforts to raise prices and stall climate progress. While charging customers for lobbying is banned in federal and state laws, consumer advocates say that existing policies are nowhere near rigorous enough to hold utilities accountable.

    In some states, that’s starting to change. In 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed the first comprehensive laws to prevent utilities from charging customers for lobbying, advertising, and other political influence activities. Customers in those states have already saved hundreds of thousands of dollars after regulators began enforcing the laws last year. 

    Consumer advocates say that as the impacts of these policies become clearer — and as utility bills continue to hike up — more laws will be on the way. Last year, eight states introduced bills to rein in utility cost recovery. Last month, five more states followed suit, according to EPI. 

    “The momentum behind utility accountability legislation continues to grow,” said Karlee Weinmann, a researcher at EPI and co-author of the group’s latest report. “As we put numbers on the savings generated by these bills, we’re going to hear more and more ratepayers asking, ‘How do I get this done in my state?’”

    The laws in Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine broadened and clarified the range of political activities utilities are banned from charging to ratepayers compared to existing federal and state rules. Costs that utilities are prohibited from passing on to customers in these states include membership dues to trade associations that engage in lobbying, donations to political advocacy groups, and public relations campaigns. The three states’ laws also introduced limits or bans on invoicing customers for fees for consultants or lawyers hired to argue for rate increases, and required utilities to provide detailed annual reports on political spending to ensure that shareholders — rather than consumers — foot the bill. 

    It’s still too early to assess the full impact of these laws since they apply primarily during rate cases, proceedings where utilities seek approval from regulators to adjust their prices. As part of the process, utilities tally up their investments and expenses, and state officials decide which costs can be reasonably passed on to the utility’s customers. Only a few rate cases have taken place since the laws took effect, and Maine just approved rules this week on how to implement its law. But judging from recent proceedings in Colorado and Connecticut, “We’re seeing very, very positive signs” in terms of what kinds of savings utility customers can expect from these laws, said Itai Vardi, co-author of the EPI report.

    A white-haired man holds signs saying 'Climate Voter!' and 'No New Fossil Fuel Plants' next to other people holding signs that say 'No New Gas' and 'The Climate Crisis Is Here'
    Environmental groups protest Xcel Energy’s plan to build new natural gas plants and its membership in the American Gas Association in Denver, Colorado, in 2023.
    Hyoung Chang / The Denver Post via Getty Images

    In Colorado, state regulators rejected more than $775,000 in lobbying fees, trade association dues, and investor relations costs sought by the utility Xcel Energy in a gas rate case last year, noting that those expenses are forbidden under the state’s utility accountability law. Total savings could end up even higher: Commissioners also ordered Xcel Energy to resubmit lobbying disclosures and remove all investor relations costs from its rates. 

    In Connecticut, state officials nixed $555,000 in industry dues, travel and meal expenses, and investor relations costs that the utility Avangrid attempted to stick customers with during a gas rate case last year, according to EPI’s review of rate case filings. Regulators also cited the new utility accountability law for their reasoning.

    Early enforcement in these states proves how effective these guardrails are. It’s also a troubling sign that utilities repeatedly attempt to recover lobbying and political costs even in states where it’s illegal, said Weinmann. “When we see these savings, we’re also seeing the degree to which expenses that are not associated with the provision of utility service and perhaps not beneficial to customers are included in rates.”

    In every state in the U.S., the regulators who hear rate cases — known as public service commissions or public utility commissions — are supposed to keep inappropriate charges out of prices. Without rigorous legislation, they’re not always successful: The burden falls on commissioners and consumer advocacy groups to comb through thousands of pages submitted by utilities for rate proposals and pick out and dispute charges. But some utility requests are too egregious to make it past public utility commissions, even in the absence of comprehensive ratepayer protection laws.

    In Virginia, state regulators have flagged and removed millions of dollars in lobbying charges by Dominion Energy in rate cases in 2021 and 2023. In California, an investigation by state regulators found that the utility SoCalGas improperly charged customers for lobbying to promote the use of natural gas. And in a particularly flagrant example, subsidiaries of the Ohio-based electric utility FirstEnergy agreed to refund tens of millions of dollars to customers across multiple states after charging them for lobbying costs and expenses related to FirstEnergy’s bribery of Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder between 2017 and 2020.

    People in blue t-shirts walk along a street in front of a tower holding a blue banner that says 'SoCalGas' with palm trees in the background
    Representatives of SoCalGas march at the Long Beach Pride Parade in 2023. Harmony Gerber / Getty Images

    Utilities are also spending vast sums on advertising to boost their company image. According to the EPI report, 15 of the largest electric utilities in the U.S. spent a combined $1.1 billion on brand advertising between 2014 and 2023. It’s unclear if any of those expenses were passed on to customers, but some utilities have made attempts to do so: Last year, Chesapeake Utilities in Maryland asked regulators for permission to charge ratepayers for its “Natural Gas Does More” campaign, which used puppies and other cuddly images to promote the fossil fuel. Maryland state officials deemed the request inappropriate and not in the public interest.

    Utilities have even tried to pass on the costs of lavish corporate perks like private jets. In a rate case last year, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called a request by Detroit-based utility DTE Energy to charge ratepayers for private jet trips “downright insulting to customers.” Michigan regulators later refused the request. In Indiana, Duke Energy Indiana admitted that it had charged consumers more than $5 million between 2021 and 2023 in private jet costs, according to testimony filed last year by the consumer advocacy group Citizens Action Coalition. Commissioners in Indiana recently denied another request from Duke Energy Indiana to pass on $1.9 million in private aircraft expenses to customers.

    National utility trade associations strongly disputed the EPI report’s findings and emphasized their commitment to reducing emissions and providing affordable energy. “The natural gas industry has long committed to collaboration with policymakers and regulators to help achieve our nation’s ambitious climate and energy goals,” said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities. 

    A spokesperson for Edison Electric Institute, a trade organization for investor-owned electric utilities, argued there’s no need for more state-level ratepayer protection laws. “Electric companies already are subject to strict federal and state laws that ensure lobbying activities are always funded by shareholders and not customers,” said spokesperson Brian Reil. “In instances of inadvertent expenses being approved, mechanisms already exist for state commissions to ensure that accounting changes are made, and, if needed, customer refunds granted.”

    But in the absence of laws like the ones in Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine, it’s impossible to know exactly how much utilities are improperly charging customers, said Adria Tinnin, director of race equity and legislative policy at The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group in California. Under existing California rules, utilities can classify spending in even prohibited categories like promotional advertising or lobbying in vague or misleading ways, Tinnin said.

    Meanwhile, during rate cases, utility regulators and advocates are often working with limited information because “utilities do not provide any information that they’re not legally required to,” said Tinnin. “If we don’t have transparency, we can’t know to what extent ratepayers are being ripped off.”

    More and more lawmakers are catching on to the issue. In January, legislators in Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Utah introduced bills to prevent utilities from recovering costs for lobbying and other political activities. In California, Tinnin’s group is partnering with other advocacy organizations to develop language for a similar bill to be introduced later this year. A previous utility accountability bill introduced last year in the state failed to move out of committee.

    Consumer advocates say the laws could help address a growing energy affordability crisis as households struggle with mounting prices. Household utility bill debt has risen 8.4 percent since December 2023, according to one estimate, while power shutoffs for nonpayment have soared across the country. President Donald Trump’s threat to introduce tariffs on fossil fuels from Canada will likely raise energy prices even more while his other tariffs will make all kinds of products more expensive. 

    “It all adds up,” said Weinmann. “At a time when we’re seeing folks across the country struggling with rising cost of living and higher utility bills, the impact of any bill savings is significant.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Colorado and Connecticut saved residents hundreds of thousands of dollars on their utility bills on Feb 6, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Finger-Pointing Over Funding Freeze May Lead Trump To Drop Lawyer Linked To DOGE

    The recent federal funding freeze spurred immediate finger-pointing inside the Trump administration, with anonymous sources telling major news outlets that attorney Mark Paoletta was responsible for drafting the infamous memo that briefly paused trillions in federal funds. Paoletta, newly returned as the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) general counsel, is connected to a wide range of powerful figures on the right, including multiple conservative Supreme Court justices, the organizers of Project 2025, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

    The post Finger-Pointing Over Funding Freeze May Lead Trump To Drop Lawyer Linked To DOGE appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Trump’s agenda won’t let his energy secretary achieve ‘energy abundance’

    Chris Wright, a Colorado fracking executive, was confirmed on Monday by the U.S. Senate with a vote of 59 to 38 to become the Secretary of Energy.

    Wright’s nomination hearing, held last month before the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was a relatively amiable affair. Though there were interruptions by Sunrise Movement protesters and a heated exchange with California senator Alex Padilla over Wright’s past comments dismissing the link between climate change and wildfires, Wright was not subjected to the contentious questioning that some of President Trump’s other cabinet nominees have faced. He was introduced by Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, as a personal friend, and four of the committee’s Democrats voted for his confirmation.

    While he acknowledged that “climate change is a real and global phenomenon,” Wright also insisted that “there isn’t dirty energy and clean energy; all energy is different and they all have different tradeoffs.” He pledged “to unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore our energy dominance,” to “lead the world in innovation and technology breakthroughs,” and to “build things in America again and remove barriers to progress.” Pressed on the policy particulars by the committee members, he expressed support for expanding nuclear power, renewables, and liquefied natural gas, and said he believed the nation’s transmission system needs to be expanded, and that this should be prioritized in future permitting reforms.

    Part of the reason for Wright’s friendly reception was that he articulated a coherent, if tendentious, version of the “energy abundance” theory of how increasing the domestic production of energy in all forms — including fossil fuels — could enable the U.S. to adequately address the climate crisis. The vision Wright laid out broadly overlaps with a set of ideas that has gained prominence among energy policy thinkers in both parties — as well as in some sectors of the climate movement who see an opportunity for permitting and transmission reforms and nuclear subsidies as a reasonable tradeoff for increased oil and gas production.

    In the committee hearing, Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy — a Republican and the lead sponsor of a bill to tax imports of carbon-intensive goods — told Wright, “I like your emphasis upon abundance.” And both the committee’s Republican chair, Mike Lee, and Democratic ranking member, Martin Heinrich, asked Wright to describe how he would promote energy abundance.

    “The term ‘energy abundance’ is definitely having a moment,” said Katie Auth, policy director of the Energy for Growth Hub and a former USAID official. “I have heard it used in many different contexts by many different people who are coming at this from different ideological angles.”

    But what, exactly, does it mean?

    Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute — the climate think tank perhaps best associated with the term, and a longtime gadfly of the environmental movement — said a core idea of his organization is that “technology and abundant energy can help solve ecological problems, not just cause them.”

    Perhaps the most obvious example is the hope that nuclear energy can help speed our transition away from fossil fuels without sacrificing reliability, but self-described “ecomodernists” like Trembath dream of a wide range of possibilities that would be unlocked by sufficient energy. 

    “If you had really abundant solar or nuclear, then energy-intensive industrial processes like water desalination or indoor agriculture start to look a lot more economical,” Trembath said. “You could imagine desalinating seawater and not having to deplete rivers and aquifers. You could imagine sparing land that could grow produce and other water-intensive crops.”

    To Auth, the term doesn’t just encompass futuristic hopes of unlocking miracle solutions by increasing electricity supply; it has immediate importance for the world’s hundreds of millions who lack access to electricity, and the even greater numbers whose countries’ development is hampered by inadequate power infrastructure.

    “Outside of the U.S. and Europe, across Africa and Southeast Asia, we need a lot more power,” Auth said. “People need not only basic electricity services, but they need to build competitive economies, they need to build modern industry, they need to build manufacturing facilities, and to be climate resilient. They need electricity for air conditioning and all sorts of infrastructure. So I think abundance to me means that we need to be extremely ambitious in the scope and speed at which we try to build out energy infrastructure around the world.”

    In Wright’s confirmation hearing, he spoke eloquently of the tragedy of energy poverty and the need for electrification in developing countries. “I think we’re going to see more abundant energy resources coming out of our country and hopefully out of the world so that everyone else can live lives like we do,” he said.

    “I appreciated Chris Wright drawing attention to the fact that, here in the U.S., we take for granted that the lights will be on and that we have refrigerators and televisions, and that’s just simply not the reality for millions and millions of people,” said Auth, of the Energy for Growth Hub.

    But Wright’s commitment to energy abundance stood in marked contrast to the agenda, augured in Project 2025, that seems to underlie Trump’s executive orders so far, which would make it very difficult for Wright to act on his stated priorities of increased energy supply and funding for research and development.

    Trump started off his second administration by declaring an “energy emergency” — but followed this up by unilaterally freezing all new permitting and leasing for wind energy in federal lands and waters. The president then attempted last week to freeze many federal grants and loans — an order that threw the government into chaos and whose current status is contested. And Trump’s blanket freeze of foreign aid has already gouged the administration’s ability to make good on Wright’s vision of helping the developing world electrify: Programs like Power Africa, which directed USAID funds toward ending energy poverty in Africa, are now in question and, according to Auth, may have already been halted.

    The president’s moves raise the question of how exactly Wright, as energy secretary, can ensure “energy abundance” if his boss isn’t on board.

    “From day one, the incoming Trump administration dispelled any pretense of supporting energy abundance,” said Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special adviser at the Department of Energy, in an email. “Instead, it is taking the unprecedented step of leveraging the executive’s emergency powers to block energy resources the president dislikes. To the extent Mr. Wright favors energy abundance, he faces a steep uphill battle against a White House controlled by ideologues who appear more focused on waging tribal energy warfare than solving real-world problems.”

    “You see shades of energy abundance in both parties,” Trembath said. On the Republican side, he pointed to the emergence of the term “‘energy dominance’ — which I think is really a Trumpy spin on the idea of energy abundance.” And among Democrats, energy abundance can practically be described as the guiding vision of the last four years’ American energy policy, which combined massive federal investments in green technology with record levels of oil and gas production. “The Biden administration and Democrats in the Department of Energy and Congress had their own vision of abundance articulated in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” Trembath said.

    But both parties also have their corners of resistance to the energy-maximization agenda, for motivations ranging from conservationism on the part of environmental groups to profit on the part of fossil fuel companies who see renewables as an existential threat. And while liberals and the regulations they pass often get cast as the villains in the endlessly proliferating laments about America’s lost industrial age, the new administration is showing its ability to use the same tools to its ends. 

    “A very cogent argument could be made that Trump’s executive orders so far are not in the spirit of energy abundance or energy dominance; they’re draping more red tape over projects they don’t like,” Trembath said. “This is the NIMBY proceduralism that Republicans complain about with drilling for oil and gas, but when the shoe’s on the other foot they’re happy to weaponize the National Environmental Policy Act against projects they don’t like.”

    Wright’s ability to increase energy production will be hobbled by the fact that the Energy Department simply doesn’t directly control the building or permitting of most new energy infrastructure, or write the rules that govern it. The most substantial portion of the department’s budget is spent on the maintenance of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The DOE’s primary levers of influence over the nation’s electricity grids are the purse strings for investments in new technologies and subsidies for project developers — and even in those areas, the money must be approved by Congress and, politically speaking, ultimately subject to the president’s agenda. 

    “EPA actually has more say over regulating energy infrastructure than DOE; the Interior Department has more say over leasing of public lands,” said Trembath. “In terms of building and regulating and permitting infrastructure, it’s largely out of the remit of the DOE. Likewise, Congress is in charge of what gets spent at the DOE.”

    There are some arenas in which Wright will have the power to enact his ambitions, like liquefied natural gas terminals, for which Trump has lifted a Biden administration moratorium and the DOE issues permits. Another is buying and selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to stabilize energy prices, a practice heavily used by Biden’s energy secretary Jennifer Granholm. Finally, the Department of Energy controls a once-obscure energy financing agency called the Loan Programs Office, which came into the public eye as the most prominent vehicle for the Biden administration’s climate investments under the leadership of Jigar Shah, a former solar developer who likes to talk about “energy abundance” (the phrase appears in his Twitter bio).

    One signal of Wright’s intentions arose during his confirmation hearings, when the energy committee’s Republican chair, Mike Lee, asked him to commit to immediately suspending the issuance of new Loan Programs Office loans on the basis of a Trump-appointed inspector general’s report alleging conflicts of interest in the contracts the office had awarded. Wright said he was aware of the report, but did not commit to suspending new loans.

    However, the question — and Wright’s authority to decide how to proceed — was soon preempted by the administration’s funding freeze. For the time being, the office is effectively shut down.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s agenda won’t let his energy secretary achieve ‘energy abundance’ on Feb 4, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A Michigan nuclear plant is slated to restart, but Trump could complicate things

    This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

    The owners of a shuttered nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Michigan are still banking on its historic reopening later this year, despite the confusion of President Donald Trump’s first days. 

    The Palisades Nuclear Plant ran for over 50 years in southwest Michigan’s Covert Township before it went offline, seemingly for good, in 2022. Soon after, lawmakers across the political spectrum and owner Holtec International pushed for a reversal. Holtec officials say they’re confident in the restart, partly because Trump’s administration has signaled strong support for nuclear power. 

    However, Trump’s messaging on nuclear hasn’t been uniform in the past, and more confusion has been kicked up by orders to pause Inflation Reduction Act funding and a now-rescinded memo calling to temporarily pause all federal loans and grants. 

    Such an environment could complicate things for projects like Palisades that require stability to plan for, say, large capital investments, according to Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the centrist think tank Third Way.

    The nuclear industry needs to know that policies, regulations, and promised funding “are actually delivered on time and in predictable ways,” he said. (Third Way supports the restart.)

    The White House Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment. 

    There’s been renewed interest in nuclear power — and restarting mothballed plants — amid increased demand for electricity from technologies like data centers and efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

    Last year, the Biden administration pledged about $2.8 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding toward the restart and other clean energy, including a $1.5 billion loan for Holtec and $1.3 billion in grants to help two rural electric cooperatives purchase that power: Indiana-based Hoosier Energy and Michigan’s Wolverine Power Cooperative.

    Based in northern Michigan, Wolverine plans to buy over half of Palisades’ energy — whether or not it receives the estimated $650 million in IRA funding, which the co-op said would be passed along to customers.

    Michigan law requires 100 percent clean energy by 2040, and it considers nuclear power clean. The state is allocating $300 million for the plant’s restart, which is expected to bring back 800 megawatts of power — enough for some 800,000 homes.

    Wolverine officials said this would allow their members to reach the state’s energy goals a decade ahead of time. Zach Anderson, the chief operating officer, said during an interview with Grist in October that Palisades was a “perfect fit” for the co-op.

    If the restart doesn’t happen, he said Wolverine wouldn’t lose money, but would have to take more time and “a lot more solar to replace something like Palisades.”

    Now the co-op is figuring out what to make of Trump’s orders to pause and review IRA spending, and subsequent guidelines.

    Officials with Holtec maintain that they don’t pose a problem, and that the Department of Energy will stick to the $1.5 billion loan. As for the power purchase agreement with the electric cooperatives, it “was completed well before any grants were factored in,” said spokesperson Patrick O’Brien in an email. 

    Nuclear power is polarizing, and behind the latest deluge of executive actions, the debate continues around whether and how much to rely on, invest in, and develop it. 

    Critics — and even Trump himself — have pointed to the industry’s history of delays and going over budget, like the new Vogtle reactors in Georgia, which came online years behind schedule.

    Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist with the group Beyond Nuclear, thinks the Palisades restart is ill-advised.

    “This is unprecedented risk taking that they’re talking about now. They’ve never done this before. It’s not needed,” he said. “Renewables are really the way to go, not resurrecting very problematic nuclear power plants.”

    Beyond Nuclear has been an outspoken critic of Holtec, with longstanding concerns including radioactive contamination and nuclear waste storage. It has also intervened in the licensing process for the restart. Kamps said if necessary, they will take the matter to federal court.

    “We’ll fight it as long as we can, till the last opportunity,” he said. “We feel that strongly about it.”

    Environmental groups like Sierra Club Michigan have spoken against the restart as well, urging the state to develop renewables and energy storage instead. 

    While renewable energy has been on the rise — and generated over a fifth of the country’s electricity in 2023 — nuclear power is the third-largest source, something its supporters say can’t be dismissed. A common argument for nuclear is that it provides a baseload of power necessary to supplement less reliable renewable technologies harnessing the sun and wind.

    Of course, developing nuclear power is expensive. Allison Macfarlane, a professor and director of the University of British Columbia’s school of public policy who chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012 to 2014, said advancing nuclear technology, including things like smaller reactors, will require federal support.  

    “To bring any of these new technologies to a real commercial level will take an investment of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. The only place where you can find that amount of money is the government,” she said, pointing out that the Trump administration wants to cut costs. 

    There are also procedural obstacles. Before reopening the Palisades plant, Holtec must get approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will assess the facility, including its safety and infrastructure. For instance, inspectors are looking at issues with the plant’s steam generators, and regulators have called Holtec’s timeline “very, very demanding.” 

    More broadly, the recent funding back-and-forth may complicate the landscape for nuclear, according to Tyler Norris, who worked in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration and is now a fellow at Duke University. 

    “Based on real-world conversations with regulators, I can say firsthand that the uncertainty the Trump administration has created around the future of these programs is dampening the investment environment for advanced nuclear,” Norris said. 

    Others say Trump’s support for nuclear is clear in signs like his pick for energy secretary, fossil fuel executive Chris Wright, who has talked about expanding it. Quill Robinson, a senior advisor with the right-of-center nonprofit ConservAmerica, thinks that could continue.

    “For many Republicans who have questions about the intermittency issues of wind and solar and the concentration of renewable supply chains in China, they see nuclear as a solution that also happens to be quite environmentally friendly,” he said. “So I would imagine that this administration is going to be pretty bullish on [nuclear] technology.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A Michigan nuclear plant is slated to restart, but Trump could complicate things on Jan 31, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Trump wants more drilling, but the oil market is already saturated

    This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization with a mission to produce in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

    Despite President Donald Trump’s calls to “drill, baby, drill,” many oil companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico will likely do what they’ve done for years: sit on hundreds of untapped oil leases across millions of acres. 

    Trump has repeatedly said eliminating barriers to drilling will unlock vast untapped reserves of “liquid gold” and ignite a new era of national prosperity. But most of the drilling leases already granted to companies in the oil-rich Gulf are idle and unused, and they’ll stay that way until the United States’ record-breaking production rates wane and the high costs of drilling offshore drop precipitously. 

    Of the 2,206 active leases in the Gulf, only a fifth are producing oil, according to records from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which regulates offshore drilling. Oil industry executives and analysts say the current number of 448 oil-producing leases is unlikely to grow significantly, even if Trump makes good on promises to expand leasing opportunities and expedite drilling permits. 

    The market is saturated with oil, making companies reluctant to spend more money drilling because the added product will likely push prices down, cutting into profits. 

    “It’s not the regulations that are getting in the way, it’s the economics,” said Hugh Daigle, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Texas in Austin. “It’s true that there are a bunch of undeveloped leases in the Gulf, and it’ll stay that way if we continue to see low or stagnant oil prices.”

    A bar chart showing the number of acres and count of leases for oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico, broken down by active versus producing leases. Active acreage and lease counts drastically outpace producing leases.
    Clayton Aldern / Grist / Peter Olexa / Unsplash

    Global oil production is expected to grow more than demand over the next two years, likely forcing the price of crude to drop 8 percent in 2025 and another 11 percent next year, according to a January forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA.

    The Gulf accounts for 97 percent of all offshore oil and gas production in the U.S. Nearly 12 million acres are under active leases in the Gulf, but only about 2.4 million acres are being used to produce oil and gas, according to BOEM data.

    So, what’s the actual benefit of a quicker and easier regulatory process for companies that don’t appear to need more leases?

    “It’s simple,” said Brett Hartl, the Center for Biological Diversity’s government affairs director. “The companies make more money when they have to spend less time and effort on permits and environmental regulations and mitigation.”

    A host of environmental and worker safety rules enacted after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster has made obtaining a lease and drilling permit a multi-year process. Companies must demonstrate their operations are prepared to deal with potential blowouts and worst-case-scenario discharges, and all drilling platform designs and materials must undergo certification by independent engineers. 

    It’s unclear how the Trump administration will change these and other offshore drilling rules. During Trump’s first term, his administration loosened requirements for offshore well designs, materials, and monitoring technology. Former President Joe Biden reinstated most of these rules. 

    Oil companies cheered Trump’s recent calls for a more streamlined process and a series of energy-related executive orders he signed this month. The orders declared an “energy emergency,” expanded drilling in the Arctic and repealed Biden’s ban on drilling off the East and West coasts and parts of Alaska. 

    “Directing regulators to expand access to resources [and] streamline permitting processes … will help deliver a stronger, more prosperous energy future for all Americans,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement last week. “This is a new day for American energy, and we applaud President Trump for moving swiftly to chart a new path where U.S. oil and natural gas are embraced, not restricted.”

    But industry leaders have also been clear that these and other policy changes floated by Trump won’t lead to more drilling. The U.S. is already producing more crude oil than any country, ever, according to the EIA. Last year’s production rate of 13 million barrels per day was a new record high, surpassing the previous record set in 2023.

    “I don’t think today that production in the U.S. is constrained,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told Semafor in November. “So, I don’t know that there’s an opportunity to unleash a lot of production in the near term, because most operators in the U.S. are [already] optimizing their production today.”

    In essence, oil is just too cheap to justify more drilling. If prices do go up, companies are likely to tap into Permian Basin shale in Texas and New Mexico rather than seek offshore reserves, which cost more to drill, according to industry analysts.  

    But that doesn’t mean companies won’t snap up even more offshore leases if they’re offered, Daigle said. 

    “Some of these (leases) might be drilled in the future, but many are being held just so somebody else doesn’t lease them,” he said. Companies may also stockpile leases to raise funds from investors, or they may simply be playing “mind games” with competitors. Buying up leases in one area of the Gulf can sometimes throw rival drillers off the scent of richer deposits elsewhere, Daigle said. 

    Leases have been sold too quickly and cheaply in recent decades, according to a 2021 report by the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees BOEM. This fast and loose approach “shortchanges taxpayers” and encourages “speculators to purchase leases with the intent of waiting for increases in resource prices, adding assets to their balance sheets, or even reselling leases at profit rather than attempting to produce oil or gas,” the report said. 

    “More leases may make the companies look good, on paper, to investors,” said Tom Pelton, communications director for the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental watchdog group. “But they won’t necessarily even produce more oil and gas. And they certainly will not be good for the climate or clean water.”

    If Trump really wanted to slash energy prices for U.S. consumers, he wouldn’t have banned offshore wind leasing in federal waters or restarted permitting for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, said Scott Eustis, the community science director for Healthy Gulf, a nonprofit environmental group. 

    Shipping LNG overseas contributes to higher electricity and natural gas prices in the U.S., according to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report.

    “LNG exports make everybody’s energy cost more because we’re giving it to China and not using it domestically,” Eustis said. 

    Beyond the economics, giving companies an easier route to secure leases and permits does little more than put the Gulf at risk of another Deepwater Horizon-scale disaster, Hartl said.

    “The only result we’ll have is more risky drilling,” he said. “And then the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ we’ll have the next catastrophic spill in the Gulf.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump wants more drilling, but the oil market is already saturated on Jan 31, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • DeepSeek unearths Australia’s AI opportunity

    The arrival of a Chinese challenger shows Australia isn’t out of the AI arms race and could even carve out a dominant position in powering the technology, according to one of Australia’s leading AI experts. DeepSeek disrupted the AI scene this week by releasing a genuine alternative to US giants like OpenAI that it built…

    The post DeepSeek unearths Australia’s AI opportunity appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Almost half of US states haven’t done the bare minimum to cut utility bills

    During his first week in office, President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, declared an energy emergency, renewed his vow to “drill, baby, drill,” and began dismantling American climate policy. That has left environmental advocates looking to states to lead the nation’s efforts to burn fewer fossil fuels — and a report released Wednesday shows there is much more they can do.

    One of the most powerful tools at each state’s disposal is the ability to work with utilities to encourage energy efficiency. But, the report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE, details how only 26 states, along with the District of Columbia, have established a so-called “energy efficiency resource standard,” or EERS. These targets, set by legislators or utility regulators, require utilities to implement programs — such as weatherization or rebates on appliances — that cut energy consumption by a certain amount each year.

    “There is more work that needs to be done,” said Jasmine Mah, a senior research analyst at the Council and an author of the report. Since 2012, just three states have added such a standard, while New Hampshire, Ohio, and Iowa repealed theirs in favor of less ambitious or scaled back programing. Arizona is also pursuing a rollback. Mah says the report is aimed at state policymakers and regulators, who could shift that tide. 

    “We hope that highlighting the positive impacts of having an EERS in place would encourage states to pass a policy,” she said. An earlier ACEE report found that, as of 2017, states with an energy efficiency resource standard saw four times the electricity savings as states without one. In 2023, states with such a plan accounted for about 59 percent of the U.S. population but 82 percent of the savings.

    “States aren’t doing this just because of climate change,” said Barry Rabe, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who studies energy and climate politics. “There is an economic advantage.”

    Fossil-fuel friendly Texas, Rabe noted, was the first to adopt an EERS in 1999. But efficiency can become less of a priority when energy supplies are abundant and costs are stable. “The decline in interest,” Rabe said, “has in some degree coincided with the massive increase in natural gas use in the U.S.” 

    Still, the Council also found that many states have gone beyond baseline policies and implemented what the report dubs “next-generation” initiatives that aim to lower greenhouse gas emissions, spur electrification, serve lower-income populations, and reduce consumers’ financial energy burdens. All but four of the 27 states (including DC) with an energy efficiency resource standard have implemented at least one such effort, but only nine have adopted all of them, leaving plenty of room for growth. 

    “We found that low income targets are the most common complimentary goal related to efficiency standards,” said Mah. “[But] not many states had provisions for energy affordability.”

    The report spotlights five states that have been particularly effective at employing these programs. Illinois has targeted using only clean energy by 2050. Massachusetts aims to install half a million heat pumps by 2030. Michigan mandates that utilities dedicate at least 25 to 35 of their energy efficiency funding to programs serving low-income customers. Utilities in New York and Minnesota have capped the portion of a customer’s income that can go toward utility costs at 6 and 4 percent, respectively.

    President Trump’s push to repeal the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, likely won’t impact state EERSs because they are generally funded through fees added to utility bills. “We see that as probably the best way to bring significant funds,” said Justin Brant, the utility program director at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project. 

    Critics of Arizona’s EERS, which was adopted in 2010, point to the $3 billion cost to customers. “Utilities should select the most cost-effective energy mix to provide reliable and affordable service, without being constrained by government-imposed mandates that make it more expensive for their customers,” said Arizona Corporation Commissioner Nick Myers, in a statement last year. But the state’s largest electric utility found that, in 2023, EERS investments reaped about twice as much in returns as was spent. 

    “We’re saving money for all customers, even those who aren’t participating,” said Brant. 

    The IRA does provide nearly $9 billion for energy efficiency and electrification programs, almost all of which is distributed via states and could be used on next-generation programs, like those serving low-income households. That money has already been awarded. But the Republican-controlled Congress could roll back federal tax credits for energy efficiency and electrification, which indirectly make it easier for states to achieve their energy efficiency resource standard and next-generation goals. 

    Brant says he would add another policy to the Council’s “next-generation” wishlist for states: programs that encourage customers to spread out the timing of their daily energy use. Lower peak demand means power plants don’t need to be as large and that, he said, will be especially critical as renewable energy becomes an increasing part of the country’s electricity mix. 

    “​​Time shift is not something that this report looked at,” he said. “I think that’s another piece that needs to be prioritized.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Almost half of US states haven’t done the bare minimum to cut utility bills on Jan 29, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Alberta’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ Enforcement Strategy Doesn’t Apply To Polluters

    “Alberta is taking a zero-tolerance approach to crime,” bragged Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in 2023 on social media after her government announced more enforcement, greater emphasis on public safety, and limited discretion of prosecutors to let offenders off the hook. “

    “There is an increasing sense that the system is not holding criminals properly accountable and letting the public suffer the consequences,” chimed in Alberta Minister of Justice Mickey Amery during the announcement. “This is simply unacceptable.”

    If only the governing United Conservative Party applied those laudable principles to oil sands companies that repeatedly flout legal requirements not to pollute waterways, air and land.

    The post Alberta’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ Enforcement Strategy Doesn’t Apply To Polluters appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • What Trump’s executive action could do to offshore wind

    Offshore wind is a fledgling industry in the U.S. — one that, until this week, was poised for renewal after a slew of cancelled projects. The Biden administration had set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of projects by 2030 (approximately a 150-fold increase from the current amount of offshore wind generation nationwide), and state-level commitments are even higher. But President Donald Trump has long nursed an apparent vendetta against wind energy.

    On Monday, his first day in office, Trump fulfilled a campaign promise and issued an executive action pausing new permits and lease sales for wind energy on federal lands and waters, pending a review by federal agencies. “We don’t want windmills in this country,” he told Fox News.

    As a result, trade unions and low-income port communities that were depending on construction jobs from those projects will be disappointed; some coastal states’ climate targets will be harder to meet; and the prospects for grid reliability in the face of the expected nationwide growth in energy demand are a little less bright.

    Besides its climate value as a form of carbon-free energy, offshore wind plays a useful role in a power grid alongside solar energy and onshore wind. Like other renewable technologies, its power is intermittent — but because its availability depends on different environmental factors from those resources, offshore wind can be thought of as  “a form of storage,” explained Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley and a former U.S. Science Envoy.

    There are three operating wind farms in American waters today, off the coasts of Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia. Of these, only one — New York’s South Fork Wind Farm — is a large-scale project. But many others are in various stages of development — and among the major open questions around the executive action is whether projects that have already received leases and permits will face jeopardy. “I’m worried about not only future projects but also about the current ones,” said Kammen.

    The executive action notes that the offshore leasing pause does not affect “rights under existing leases in the withdrawn areas” — but also mandates that the Secretary of the Interior conduct a review of “the necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases” and of the “legal bases for such removal.”

    One such legal tool available to Trump is to simply drop the federal government’s defense of permits that are being contested in court.

    The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, is currently being sued over the permits it awarded to at least four wind projects: Rhode Island’s Revolution Wind, New York’s South Fork Wind, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, and the Maryland Offshore Wind Project. 

    Timothy Fox, managing director of the research firm ClearView Energy Partners, told Grist in an email that the executive action “strongly suggests … that the Trump Administration is unlikely to vigorously defend offshore wind project permits issued by the Biden Administration,” and moreover will “encourage offshore wind foes to file additional legal challenges” against existing projects.

    But there may be a countervailing incentive for the administration to avoid dropping its defenses of the projects, according to Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO: the fact that BOEM is also responsible for awarding permits for offshore oil drilling — which Trump hopes to supercharge.

    “I think their legal calculus is going to take into account: ‘If we simply fold the cards, what does that do to this agency’s authority?’ They don’t want to give up that authority,” Crowley said. “In my experience no federal administration wants to give up any authority that it has.”

    “If they want BOEM to approve offshore drilling, and they ceded that authority on offshore wind, that’s going to allow people that don’t want offshore drilling to happen to point to this decision as a precedent,” Crowley added.

    Fox characterized this as a “fair argument,” agreeing that “if the Trump Administration were to firmly side with petitioners, and if the court(s) were to agree, it could set a precedent that sets a high environmental bar for other energy sectors (e.g., offshore oil and gas).” But there may be ways around this dilemma.

    The administration could simply invoke arguments that are particular to the environmental effects of offshore wind and don’t apply to drilling, which largely occurs in different regions and has different ecological impacts. “For example, the Trump Administration could argue that individual offshore wind projects and their cumulative impacts could negatively impact the North Atlantic right whale, a listed endangered species,” Fox wrote — an issue that has little bearing on drilling operations.

    Like many in the flurry of Trump’s first-day executive orders, the ambiguity creates uncertainty — and leaves some room for hope for stakeholders in the wind industry. 

    “One of the ways to interpret what Trump is doing is creating the situation where he can eventually take credit for the offshore wind industry continuing and expanding,” Crowley said. “If we’ve learned anything from Trump, he’ll take credit for good things and deflect blame for the bad things.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What Trump’s executive action could do to offshore wind on Jan 24, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • California just debunked a big myth about renewable energy

    One of the biggest myths about renewable energy is that it isn’t reliable. Sure, the sun sets every night and winds calm down, putting solar panels and turbines to sleep. But when those renewables are humming, they’re providing the grid with electricity and charging banks of batteries, which then supply power at night. 

    A new study in the journal Renewable Energy that looked at California’s deployment of renewable power highlights just how reliable the future of energy might be. It found that last year, from late winter to early summer, renewables fulfilled 100 percent of the state’s electricity demand for up to 10 hours on 98 of 116 days, a record for California. Not only were there no blackouts during that time, thanks in part to backup battery power, but at their peak the renewables provided up to 162 percent of the grid’s needs — adding extra electricity California could export to neighboring states or use to fill batteries. 

    “This study really finds that we can keep the grid stable with more and more renewables,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Stanford University and lead author of the new paper. “Every major renewable — geothermal, hydro, wind, solar in particular, even offshore wind — is lower cost than fossil fuels” on average, globally.

    Yet Californians pay the second highest rates for electricity in the country. That’s not because of renewables, but in part because utilities’ electrical equipment has set off wildfires — like the Camp Fire started by Pacific Gas and Electric’s power lines, which devastated the town of Paradise and killed 85 people — and now they’re passing the costs that come from lawsuits and burying transmission lines to their customers. While investigators don’t know for sure what sparked all of the wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles this month, they’ll be scrutinizing electrical equipment in the area. Power lines are especially prone to failing in high winds, like the 100-mile-per-hour gusts that turned these Southern California fires into monsters.

    Even with the incessant challenge of wildfires, California utilities are rapidly shifting to clean energy, with about half of the state’s power generated by renewables like hydropower, wind, and solar. The study compared 116 days in 2024 to the same period in 2023 and discovered California’s output from solar was 31 percent higher and wind 8 percent. After increasing more than 30-fold between 2020 and 2023, the state’s battery capacity doubled between 2023 and 2024, and is now equivalent to the juice produced by more than four nuclear power plants. According to the study, all that new clean tech helped California’s power plants burn 40 percent less fossil fuel for electricty last year.

    Those batteries help grid operators be more flexible in meeting demand for electricity, which tends to peak when people return home in the early evening and switch on appliances like air conditioners — just when the grid is losing solar power. “Now we’re seeing the batteries get charged up in the middle of the day, and then meet the portion of the demand in the evening, especially during those hot summer days,” said Mark Rothleder, chief operating officer of the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that runs the state’s grid.

    Another pervasive myth about renewables is that they won’t be able to support a lot more electric vehicles, induction stoves, and heat pumps plugging into the grid. But here, too, California busts the myth: Between 2023 and 2024, demand on the state’s grid during the study period actually dropped by about 1 percent.

    Why? In part because some customers installed their own solar panels, using that free solar energy instead of drawing power from the grid. In 2016, almost none of those customers had batteries to store that solar power to use at night. But battery adoption rose each of the following years, reaching 13 percent of buildings installing solar in 2023, then skyrocketing to 38 percent last year. (That is, of the 1,222 megawatts of solar capacity added last year, 464 megawatts included batteries.) That reduces demand on the grid because those customers can now use their solar power at night. 

    Batteries also help utilities get better returns on their investments in solar panels. A solar farm makes all its money selling electricity during the day. But if it has batteries attached to the farm, it can also provide energy in the evening, when electricity prices rise due to increased demand. “That evening battery contribution is very key to the economics working out well,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. 

    So utilities are incentivized to invest in batteries, which also provide reliable backup power to avoid blackouts. But like any technology, batteries can fail. Last week, a battery storage plant caught fire on California’s central coast, the largest of its kind in the world, but it only knocked out 2 percent of the state’s energy storage capacity. A grid fully running on renewables will have a lot of redundancy built in, beyond multiple battery plants: Electric school buses and other EVs, for instance, are beginning to send power back to the grid when a utility needs it — a potentially vast network of backup energy.

    But here’s where the economics get funky. The more renewables on the grid, the lower the electricity prices tend to be for customers, according to the new study. From October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024, South Dakota, Montana, and Iowa provided 110 percent, 87 percent, and 79 percent, respectively, of their electricity demand with renewables, particularly wind and hydropower. Accordingly, the three have some of the lowest electricity prices in the country. 

    California, on the other hand, got 47 percent of its power from renewables over the same period, yet wildfires and other factors have translated into higher electricity prices. The California Public Utilities Commission, for instance, authorized its three largest utilities to collect $27 billion in wildfire prevention and insurance costs from ratepayers between 2019 and 2023.

    Climate change is making California ever more prone to burn — a growing challenge for utilities. But the state’s banner year for solar and batteries just poked a whole lot of holes in the notion that renewables aren’t reliable.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California just debunked a big myth about renewable energy on Jan 24, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • ‘Nuclear fantasy’ threatens data centre future, PM warns

    An Australian energy system relying on a the Coalition’s nuclear power plan would shrink the opportunity for emerging technology like AI and the data centres that power it, the Prime Minister warned on Friday while launching his yearly agenda. During a National Press Club address in Canberra, Anthony Albanese said the Opposition’s energy plan left…

    The post ‘Nuclear fantasy’ threatens data centre future, PM warns appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Govt tips extra $2bn into clean energy fund

    The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has secured a $2 billion top-up from the federal government to help households and small businesses lower emissions amid the race to meet 2030 climate change targets. The world’s largest dedicated green bank will use the new investment, announced on Thursday, to “offer significant savings for households and small businesses…

    The post Govt tips extra $2bn into clean energy fund appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • The 8 talking points fossil fuel companies use to obstruct climate action

    To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform — known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk — has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech — or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site.

    Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change. More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multi-year analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from Exxon Mobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening, and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.

    Other branches of the fossil fuel industry — including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts — have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — are “aligned and coordinated … to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.” 

    “They were all talking to each other,” said the study’s lead author Alaina Kinol, a public policy doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston.

    According to the authors, the study represents the first attempt to characterize the network of misleading climate communications from these three distinct but connected nodes of the fossil fuel industry. They said the connections between these sectors are often underappreciated, even among those advocating for a fossil fuel phaseout. “You don’t want to look only at energy, which is where a lot of the attention goes,” Kinol said. Oil and gas companies see plastics as a “plan B” for their industry as policymakers try to transition to clean energy, and the agricultural sector is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for everything from fertilizers to pesticides.

    Kinol and her team downloaded more than 125,000 tweets posted between 2008 and 2023 by nine Twitter accounts —  one industry association per sector, plus two of each sector’s largest corporations — and then conducted a two-part analysis, first examining the connections between the accounts (“who’s ‘at-ing’ who,” as Kinol put it) and then analyzing the content of the tweets.

    The network analysis revealed that companies and their trade groups across all sectors were frequently tagging each other, with accounts owned by Exxon Mobil, the chemical company Dow, and the trade group the American Petroleum Institute among the most mentioned.

    For the contextual analysis, Kinol read every single tweet to identify common themes. With the 12,000 tweets that related to five selected categories — the economy, the Environmental Protection Agency, pipelines, sustainability, and water — she categorized them using a framework she dubbed “discourses of climate obstruction,” which builds on existing research to describe the way the industry groups either deny the existence of climate change or downplay the possibility and importance of responding to it. The framework includes eight types of arguments — four that represent outright climate denial, and four that represent a more nuanced form of “climate delay.”

    Denial discourse 1: It isn’t happening

    Example: “#natgas is a game-changer benefiting the economy, public health, and environment.”

    – @Chevron, 22 August 2016 (Note: This tweet has since been deleted)

    More on this strategy → 

    The “it isn’t happening” rhetoric denies the existence of climate change — or, more subtly, fossil fuels’ contribution to it. Kinol said she observed that companies usually didn’t claim outright that climate change isn’t happening, but rather implied that the use of hydrocarbons aren’t causing an increase in global temperatures. The tweet shown here by Chevron alleges that natural gas benefits the environment.

    Denial discourse 2: It isn’t that bad

    Example: “Oil, mining groups urge House to curtail EPA climate rules in CR”

    – @AmChemistry, 17 February 2011 (Note: This tweet has since been deleted)

    More on this strategy → 

    In the “it isn’t that bad” approach, fossil fuel companies argue that climate change is not severe enough to merit a policy response. This particular tweet repeats the headline of a 2011 article in The Hill describing the American Chemistry Council and other industry groups’ request that U.S. House members oppose provisions of a spending bill that would allow the Environmental Protection Agency to set stricter greenhouse gas emissions standards for some polluting facilities.

    Denial discourse 3: It isn’t us

    Example: “Congrats @exxonmobil, recipient of ACC’s #ResponsibleCare [Registered Trademark] Company of the Year Award, for initiatives to improve #EHSS performance, drive emissions reductions toward #NetZero, & inspire local communities.”

    – @AmChemistry, 30 April 2009 (Note: This tweet has since been deleted)

    More on this strategy → 

    The “it isn’t us” technique may acknowledge the reality of climate change and even fossil fuels’ contribution to it, but argues that fossil fuel companies should not be held responsible for the climate impacts of their products and that they may in fact be part of the solution. Kinol and her co-authors noted that the approach “is echoed across the sectors as the organizations provide cover to each other.” Here, the American Chemistry Council commends Exxon Mobil for ostensibly helping to reduce emissions, without acknowledging the company’s continued role in causing climate change.

    Denial discourse 4: It’s taken care of

    Example: “Collaborative approaches like @MITEngineering’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium are how we will achieve our shared vision for a sustainable future. #SeekTogether”

    – @DowNewsroom, 9 April 2012

    More on this strategy → 

    The “it’s taken care of” rhetoric, also referred to as “dismissal,” holds that climate change is not a crisis because human ingenuity is adequately addressing it — no further regulations are needed. The PLOS Climate paper describes the argument as “the smart people are on it.”

    The four types of denial rhetoric argue that climate change is either not happening, not that bad, or not caused by humans, or that it’s being adequately taken care of — arguments that have become all too familiar to those tracking the history of fossil fuel obstructionism. The tweets that promoted delay either redirected responsibility for climate change, advocated for nontransformative solutions, emphasized the downsides of climate regulations, or “surrendered” to the idea that solving climate change isn’t feasible.

    According to Jennie Stephens, a co-author of the report and a professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, talking points about delay and denial were happening together in concert between 2008 and 2023. “There was climate denial — like, ‘It’s not really a problem,’” she said — “but also delay, which was, ‘We’re already reducing emissions,’ to promote the notion that they don’t need to be regulated to further reduce emissions or fossil fuel use.

    “It all connects back to this overarching strategy of trying to control the narrative, … reinforcing this sense that there’s no way we’re ever going to phase out fossil fuels, no matter how bad the climate crisis gets,” she added. (Editor’s note: Stephens was selected as a Grist New England Fixer in 2019.)

    Delay discourse 1: Redirection

    Example: “Which do you choose – install a low-flow showerhead or wash clothes in cold water? #EarthDay”

    – @DowNewsroom, 24 April 2014
    (Note: This tweet has since been deleted)

    More on this strategy → 

    This “redirection” technique deflects responsibility for climate change away from petrochemical companies and onto individuals, often by promoting consumer choices instead of government regulations or other levers for systemic change.

    Delay discourse 2: Nontransformation

    Example: “A new project aims to design a process that recycles plastic with near-zero environmental pollution. Learn more about this joint initiative between NAFRA, Charles Darwin University, and the United Arab Emirates University. #flameretardants #circulareconomy”

    – @AmChemistry, 8 December 2021

    More on this strategy → 

    The “nontransformation” approach focuses on solutions that are unlikely to jeopardize continued petrochemical use, often relying on technologies that are unproven or that only address problems on a surface level. Stephens and Kinol said this type of rhetoric was particularly prevalent among the tweets they analyzed. For energy companies, this often meant the promotion of carbon capture technology that remains prohibitively expensive, and that has been used by fossil fuel companies to justify ongoing fossil fuel extraction and burning. For plastic companies, it was recycling, despite its well-documented failure to manage more than 10 percent of the world’s plastic waste. This tweet by the American Chemistry Council highlights recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis, instead of more systemic measures to reduce plastic production.

    Delay discourse 3: Downside emphasis

    Example: “RFS proposal threatens U.S. #energy independence, #farmeconomy”

    – @FarmBureau, 18 July 2016

    More on this strategy → 

    The “downside emphasis” tactic suggests that the drawbacks of climate and environmental regulations outweigh the benefits. For instance, this 2016 tweet from the Farm Bureau — a group that lobbies for agribusiness interests and whose state-level members have fought climate science and regulation — stresses the tradeoffs of renewable fuel standards, or RFS, which require that transportation fuels contain a minimum amount of fuel that’s deemed “renewable,” like fuel made out of plants.

    Delay discourse 4: Surrender

    Example: “Air-pollution limits proposed by the EPA on the oil & #natgas industry will be ‘overly burdensome.’”

    – @APIenergy, 2 December 2011
    (Note: This tweet has since been deleted)

    More on this strategy → 

    This rhetorical device “surrenders” to the idea that climate change mitigation is not feasible. It’s reflected here in the American Petroleum Institute’s claim that pollution limits are too burdensome to be implemented.

    The study also found that the nine companies and trade groups frequently mentioned schools and universities, which the authors interpreted as “a focused effort to shape or at least interact with teaching and learning at all levels.” Stephens said this finding was “striking” and that it reinforced other research showing how fossil fuel companies have been “very strategically investing in education as a way to normalize and demonstrate their beneficial contributions to society.”

    In response to Grist’s request for comment, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council said “chemistry plays a vital role in the creation of innovative products that make our lives and our world healthier, safer, more sustainable, and more productive.” Mike Tomko, communications director of the Farm Bureau said, “I can’t speak to a tweet that’s almost a decade old, but I can tell you that we’ve contributed positively to developing voluntary, market-based programs that are advancing climate-smart farming and helping America reach its sustainability goals.”

    Six of the other organizations — the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Corteva, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and FMC Corporation — did not respond to questions. DuPont declined to comment.

    Jill Hopke, an associate professor of journalism at the DePaul University College of Communication, was not involved in the new study but has done her own research on climate-related misinformation on Twitter. She praised the PLOS Climate study as “innovative” and grounded in prior research, although she said she’d be interested in further analysis of how the relative proportions of obstructive tactics — delay vs. denial, and nuances within those categories — have changed over time, and of the fraction of tweets that were promoted as ads. 

    “You can’t do everything in one paper,” she conceded.  

    Irena Vodenska, a professor of finance at Boston University who has experience researching climate misinformation on Twitter, agreed that the PLOS Climate paper was “comprehensive in its approach,” although she suggested additional analysis is needed to confirm whether the organizations in question really intended to obstruct climate action. This constitutes the difference between misinformation and disinformation, the latter of which refers to intentionally disseminated falsehoods and is usually much harder to prove — though it could be possible by looking at more accounts on X and across social media platforms, she suggested.

    Vodenska also noted that the transition from Twitter to X has brought changes in algorithms and content moderation policies that could complicate the extraction and analysis of future data. 

    Kinol readily acknowledged this. “This paper was written in a previous era, when Twitter was sort of the central meeting place of the world,” she said. “That’s changed, but social media is still part of a major communications strategy [from industry groups] to use various methods of denial and delay to prevent the implementation of successful climate policy.”

    Despite the rapidly changing social media landscape, Kinol is confident companies are still using the same strategies to minimize the need for climate action. “We’re at the stage of climate change where it’s all hands on deck, and I hope that our paper is helpful as a tool to combat this denial and delay,” she continued. “If you’re aware that something’s happening, it’s a lot easier to push back against it.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The 8 talking points fossil fuel companies use to obstruct climate action on Jan 21, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A new frontier in the voluntary carbon market: Old, leaky oil wells

    The environmental harm of oil and gas wells doesn’t end when the pumping stops. If disused wells remain unplugged — the term of art for closing them up with concrete and remediating the environment around them — they can leach toxic chemicals and spew planet-warming methane into the air. Some 3 million such wells dot the U.S., and the companies responsible for them have often fled the scene. In recent years, Congress has poured billions of dollars into cleaning up the mess, giving rise to a niche industry of hardscrabble well pluggers across the country.

    But all that money still isn’t anywhere close to enough, which is why carbon credit developers are also getting in on the action. A handful of private companies and nonprofits are now attempting to use the voluntary carbon market — which sells emissions-reducing schemes to institutions attempting to meet their climate goals by cutting down on carbon pollution other than their own, essentially — as a source of funding for cleanups of these orphan wells.

    Here’s how it’s supposed to work: The amount of methane leaking out of a given well can vary dramatically, so carbon credit developers first identify high emitters. They secure access to the well from landowners, obtain the right to operate and plug the well from regulators, measure the amount of methane being released, plug the well, and estimate the amount of emissions avoided as a result of their work.

    The methodology for this last, crucial calculation varies depending on the standards that the developer decides to adhere to. If the standard setter requires independent verification, the developer also hires a certification firm to audit the emissions calculation. Once the developer clears these hurdles, the standard setter issues the equivalent carbon credits into the voluntary carbon market where companies — think data centers, automobile manufacturers, and any corporate actor making promises to green their operations — can purchase them.

    Nearly 5 million credits have been generated since the first project was issued in the summer of 2023. While it’s unclear exactly if and how much these credits sold for, experts told Grist it’s reasonable to assume that they can fetch at least $10 to $30 per credit, each of which constitutes 1 metric ton of avoided carbon dioxide emissions.

    There’s clearly money to be made through the voluntary carbon market for orphan well cleanups, but the exact environmental benefits are less certain. For one, the amount of methane emissions avoided as a result of plugging a well is difficult to estimate, in part because leakage rates decline at an uncertain pace over time, as more natural gas escapes from a well and the pressure underground decreases. Some wells leak significant amounts in short bursts, while others pollute gradually. And even when a well is plugged, it’s not entirely clear that the methane will remain trapped underground. In some cases, it could bubble up from neighboring leaky wells. 

    “There are a lot of hurdles that you have to get over in order for those [carbon] credits to be any good,” said Adam Peltz, a director and senior attorney at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “And some of those hurdles require a lot of thinking and vigilance.”

    When it comes to verifying the credibility of carbon offsets, the American Carbon Registry is the most prominent standard setter. The program, founded in 1996, has developed a methodology for estimating the climate benefits of reducing emissions from landfills, restoring wetlands, and planting trees, among other activities. Since establishing a set of standards for evaluating oil and gas well pluggings in May 2023, the Registry has issued more than half of the nearly 5 million credits generated by the industry so far. The other major standard setters are CarbonPath and BCarbon.

    As for calculating the amount of methane pollution avoided when a leaky well is plugged, each standard setter has a different approach. This leads to different assessments of the number of credits that can be issued for a particular project. A key difference lies in each setter’s assessment of methane’s potential to heat the planet. Once it’s in the atmosphere, methane degrades into less potent greenhouse gases in about a decade. That means that its warming power, compared to that of carbon dioxide, is highly dependent on the timescale one chooses: Methane’s warming potential is about 80 times greater than carbon dioxide’s over a 20-year timeframe, but roughly 27 times greater over a 100-year timeframe. In calculating methane’s potential to warm the planet, BCarbon uses a 20-year timeframe while the Registry and CarbonPath use a 100-year timeframe. Because it’s using a shorter time horizon, BCarbon issues more credits.

    The standard setters also use different time horizons to estimate the period over which methane emissions are avoided as a result of a well plugging. CarbonPath assumes that by plugging a well, the developer helped protect the planet from up to 50 years of methane emissions. The other two standard setters use a period of 20 years. 

    Brad Handler, a researcher and program director of the Energy Finance Lab​ at the Colorado School of Mines, suggested that the methodologies might come closer together as more data is gathered. “I can’t sit here and tell you that one is wrong,” he said. “As buyers get more educated about all of it, the methodology may be refined.”

    In the meantime, it’s entirely possible that developers are overestimating the planetary benefits of plugging wells — and in turn helping corporations overstate their progress on their climate goals. Peltz, the Environmental Defense Fund attorney, said there was little reasoning behind assuming that emissions were avoided over 50 years rather than 20 years. “I’m hard-pressed to see a basis other than generating more credits for the same activity,” he said. 

    Concerns about overcrediting are already circulating about at least one project. Last year, a company called Rebellion Energy Solutions plugged six orphaned wells in Oklahoma and estimated that the wells leaked between 2.7 and 285 kilograms of methane per hour. Based on two measurements taken 30 days apart, Rebellion calculated an average methane leak rate of 68 kilograms per hour. Those numbers are orders of magnitude higher than the values measured by researchers. Most studies have found that unplugged orphan wells emit 10 to 30 grams of methane per hour. One study in Colorado estimated an average leak rate of 586 grams per hour and identified one instance of a super-emitting well releasing 76 kilograms per hour. 

    Rebellion issued nearly 1.9 million credits for the project — more than a third of all credits issued so far. BeZero Carbon, a global carbon credits rating agency, found that the project likely overestimated the amount of methane released. (A spokesperson for BeZero said the firm doesn’t comment on specific ratings.)

    “The values recorded by the project may reflect the worst-case-scenario baseline; a scenario that may not come to pass,” the ratings firm noted, adding that the project “faces significant over-crediting risk as a result of uncertainties regarding the project’s modeling of baseline methane leakage rates.”

    But Staci Taruscio, Rebellion’s CEO, said that the high leakage rate in the pool of wells they’ve plugged so far is in part because the company spends significant time and resources to identify high emitters. Rebellion staff conduct analyses to select wells that have historically produced natural gas and are likely to hold reserves underground that can leak. They also sign agreements with landowners giving them access to wells that academics typically can’t reach when collecting standard measurements. The company measured methane levels at roughly 3,000 wells before selecting the dozen or so highest emitters that they’ve plugged so far, said Taruscio, who worked most of her career in the oil and gas industry.

    “We have a lot of tools in our tool belt to identify those [high-emitting wells],” she said. “If you think of the oil and gas industry, our entire existence depends upon finding reservoirs with energy. That’s all we’re doing.”

    Taruscio said she was “shocked” by BeZero Carbon’s rating and has submitted the methane measurements from the other 3,000 wells for the agency to reconsider its finding. “We realized a big part of their rating was because they haven’t seen all the wells that weren’t included,” she said.

    Taruscio said that, given the novel nature of carbon credits for plugging wells, developers, standard setters, certifiers, and rating agencies are all still moving up the learning curve. 

    “There are bad actors out there,” she said. “So everybody just has to be really cautious at this point so that we don’t let bad projects through.”

    Editor’s note: The Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new frontier in the voluntary carbon market: Old, leaky oil wells on Jan 16, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Despite Trump, State-Level Climate Progress Will Continue — or Even Accelerate

    Even before President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House next Monday, California got ahead of things. Anticipating more of the federal meddling they’d seen in the past, like when Trump’s first administration tried to block the state’s vehicle emissions standards, lawmakers met in a special session to start preparing a defense of its progressive civil rights, reproductive freedom…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Norway’s Equinor Forced To Withdraw Key Carbon Capture Claim

    Equinor has retracted a claim that it stores about a million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually at its flagship carbon capture project after DeSmog obtained data showing the real figure was as little as a tenth of that amount.

    The Norwegian oil company scrubbed the estimate from its website in November, when presented with official figures showing that it captured 106,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) at its Sleipner carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility in 2023.

    Equinor has not captured 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year at the site since 2001, according to the data, provided by the Norwegian Environment Agency.

    The post Norway’s Equinor Forced To Withdraw Key Carbon Capture Claim appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Another year, more blackouts in Puerto Rico

    Around 5:30 in the morning on December 31, Yvonne Santiago was woken up by a sudden stillness: The fans had switched off. It must be a power outage, she quickly reasoned, and went back to sleep.

    When she woke up again hours later, she learned that the outage wasn’t contained to Bayamón, the Puerto Rican city where she was spending the holidays with her boyfriend’s family, but was in fact an island-wide blackout. “Reading the news, I burst out laughing,” she said.

    “We have a saying: Ríe para no llorar — laugh to not cry,” she explained. “Things are constantly happening on this island. We’re always on alert, but we also have to let go of certainty.”

    Then she set about the practical tasks that a potentially prolonged blackout demands. “The first thing that always freaks me out are the fridges, the food,” she said. She and her boyfriend packed the contents of their fridge into the ground floor of his parents’ house, which has solar power that stayed on during the blackout. Other power outages across the island have marked the first weeks of the year.

    Santiago, an illustrator and an archivist at the General Archives of Puerto Rico, said her decisions were characterized by a listlessness she’s come to find familiar in the seven years since Hurricane Maria — a period in which blackouts have become a feature of daily life in Puerto Rico. “Every time the light goes out for such a long period of time, everyone’s kind of out of it,” Santiago said. “It becomes this weird twilight zone where no one knows what to do — I guess we go into survival mode. It becomes this weird limbo.”

    Hurricane Maria was the deadliest natural disaster in the U.S. since 1900 — and it was the moment “when we all truly realized we are an island in the Caribbean,” Santiago said, “because it took so long for people to come help us.” Besides killing thousands of people, the storm also laid waste to the island’s already decaying electric grid.

    By evening on New Year’s Eve, the lights still weren’t on. Santiago was supposed to attend a party but decided not to go. “We cancelled any plans that we had, because we didn’t know what areas were gonna have electricity or not and it can be pretty dangerous if the street lights aren’t on, so we stayed at home with candlelight,” she said. Without knowing how long the blackout would last, the family was reluctant to use the limited amount of power from the solar panels to microwave up the food in the fridge. She ate a bag of Tostitos for dinner.

    The essential public infrastructure destroyed by Hurricane Maria was not adequately rebuilt; it was privatized. In 2020, Puerto Rico’s energy transmission and distribution system was sold to an American-Canadian consortium called LUMA Energy, which is overseen by Puerto Rican government agencies. And in 2023, the power generation system was similarly privatized, with all power plants under the control of a subsidiary of the American natural gas company New Fortress Energy.

    The writer Naomi Klein has analyzed these moves as a textbook application of the “shock doctrine” — a paradigm whereby capital interests take advantage of disasters to undermine public institutions and turn giant profits. In Puerto Rico, the energy privatization set off a massive protest movement whose slogan was “Fuera LUMA.” (“Get out LUMA!”)

    Since LUMA took over the electricity grid, it has raised electricity prices repeatedly — without delivering results for Puerto Ricans like Santiago, who was driven out of her last apartment in San Juan by a problem she’s found even more disruptive than the frequent blackouts: unpredictable power surges. At night, particularly if her neighbors’ lights were on, the electricity flickered on and off at random. The fluctuations destroyed three of her refrigerators in succession. After LUMA didn’t respond to her repeated complaints, she finally stopped paying the rising utility bills. 

    When a power surge destroyed her air conditioner, she decided she had to finally move out of her apartment — but she currently owes LUMA nearly $3,000 in unpaid bills. In order to turn the lights on at her new apartment, she will have to sign up for a payment plan.

    The energy crisis has affected Santiago’s work, too — and the security of the archives it is her job to preserve. “I deal with digitization and digital preservation, which is really hard to do when you’re having constant outages,” she said. In 2023, a storm flooded a transformer, and the General Archives lost power for months. More recently, one of her hard drives was destroyed, possibly by a power surge.

    In those archives, Santiago recently found a document that reminded her of just how old the problems Puerto Rico is facing really are. It was a 1934 “manifesto to the country” published in El Mundo, a San Juan newspaper, written by Luis Muñoz Marín, then a senator in the Puerto Rican legislature — and later the island’s first elected governor.

    The manifesto contained a warning to Puerto Ricans based on inside knowledge Marín had acquired in Washington: Foreign investors were planning, “under more or less alluring disguises,” to exploit the economic and public health crisis the island was suffering in the wake of the Depression and a 1928 hurricane. He said hotel developers, sugar refineries, and bamboo cane growers were using recovery money to “extend and to intrench more firmly the control of absentee capital over the lives of the Puerto Ricans.”

    And he warned that the real agenda behind this was to “use recovery funds, and give them to private companies to take over certain things,” Santiago said. “They were going to poison us in our medicine — which did happen — and the Americans were going to use different tactics to have control from far away.”

    The parallels to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria seemed all too real to Santiago. “I’ve been connecting the dots for a while now and it’s all colonialism,” she said. “LUMA is colonialism.”

    It eventually emerged that the cause of the New Year’s blackout was the failure of an underground cable that, like much of the island’s energy infrastructure, should have been repaired long ago. The company that built it has been out of business for 25 years.

    “Right now, we’re in an emergency,” Puerto Rico’s governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, said in a news conference. “Our electrical system is in such a precarious situation that anything can cause the power to go out.” 

    On New Year’s Eve, the power stayed out all day for some 1.2 million LUMA customers. Santiago was watching the time when, at 11:57 p.m., the lights came on for less than a minute, then flickered back off. Then, at 11:59, as if to herald in the new year, they came back on again.

    On the first day of 2025, a rate hike from LUMA kicked in. González-Colón was inaugurated on January 2, and though she has appointed an energy czar to address the grid’s problems, the island will enter another year with the constant risk of power failures.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Another year, more blackouts in Puerto Rico on Jan 14, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Energy is central to American politics. That all started with Jimmy Carter.

    In 1981, a Democratic president who’d made energy policy a centerpiece of his administration left the White House after just one term — voted out partly due to the perception that he didn’t do enough to combat inflation and high energy prices amid destabilizing conflict in the Middle East. His successor promised to open up the country’s oilfields and to “make America great again.”

    It’s not exactly 1981 all over again, but today — as the country holds funeral services for Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, who died on December 29 at the age of 100 — the echoes of his term in office are loud enough to warrant taking a second look at how Carter’s presidency inaugurated the world we live in, one in which energy is central to American politics. 

    “From the minute he took office, Jimmy Carter made it clear that energy reform was top of his agenda. Literally,” the Princeton historian Meg Jacobs, author of the book Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s, said in an email. “He got out of his limo during the procession to the White House, during the freezing cold, and watched the rest from a solar-heated viewing stand.”

    In symbolism and substance, President Carter displayed an obsessive attention to energy. He famously installed solar panels on the roof of the White House, but more consequentially, he created the Department of Energy, and allocated what remains a record amount of funding into energy research and development.

    Carter’s energy policy had two primary objectives: reducing the U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil, and reducing its energy consumption altogether. The first goal has remained the watchword of the nation’s energy policy ever since. But the second, rooted in the Sunday school teacher’s conservationist and communitarian ethos, helped end his presidency — and helped convince future leaders that Americans’ refusal to be told to make do with less was an immutable political fact.

    Carter’s attention to energy was the result of its appearance in the 1970s as a novel political problem. For most of the 20th century, the country had had little in the way of a coordinated energy policy, and the subject was far removed from political contestation in the public eye — even as the postwar American dream of car-dependent suburban homeownership was predicated on the assurance of oil’s eternal abundance and cheapness. The ’70s was the decade in which that promise started to crack up.

    “By the mid-1970s, if you’re a middle-class working person who’s been encouraged to move to the suburbs and buy a V8 Ford or Pontiac, you’re structurally dependent on cheap oil and access to that oil for the reproduction of your everyday life,” said Caleb Wellum, a historian at the University of Toronto.

    So it was a profoundly disruptive moment for the nation when, in October of 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced an embargo on exports of oil to any country that had supported Israel in the Six-Day War — catalyzing high gas prices in the U.S., lines of cars at gas stations stretching for blocks, and a years-long period of “stagflation” characterized by the demoralizing combination of high inflation, low growth, and high unemployment. 

    Besides the economic devastation it wrought, the embargo carried symbolic weight: “This comes after the Vietnam War, which was a blow to the collective ego of the United States because we had not emerged victorious. And then these nations that we thought were sort of our client states in the Middle East all of a sudden dictating to us about certain things. It was rather stunning at the time,” said Jay Hakes, the former administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration and director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

    The presidents who immediately inherited the situation, Richard Nixon and, upon his resignation, Gerald Ford, sought to remedy the situation primarily by expanding domestic energy production. But their focus on energy was less zealous than Carter’s — and far less visionary.

    By the time Carter took office, on January 20, 1977, memories of the gasoline lines were already starting to fade. But with inflation and oil prices still high, and the U.S. still reliant on foreign imports of oil, Carter made it his mission to remind the country that it needed to think about energy. “A lot of his presidency was about convincing Americans that there still was an energy crisis even though the embargo was over,” Wellum said. “The conditions that the embargo had taken advantage of were still present, and the U.S. still had this problem it had to figure out.”

    But Carter had a complex political coalition to wrangle behind his ambitions. The Democratic Party he led was split between two visions of how to address the issue: “You have the kind of old left, New Deal Democrat who is interested in protecting consumers, protecting the working class, and making life more affordable for more people, and that is in tension with the new left, environmentalist side of the left wing that’s questioning the ethics of consumption, saying that maybe oil is too cheap,” said Wellum.

    On the other side of the aisle, animated by free-market economic doctrines then on the rise, was a Republican Party insistent that the gas shortages were “not a matter of scarcity but a matter of government overreach, bad government policy, and environmentalist overreach,” Wellum said.

    The prescription, eagerly supported by the oil industry: “We need access to Alaska. We need access to the Outer Continental Shelf. We need to rethink how we restrict or regulate oil production,” Wellum continued. “If we do that, the free market and the oil companies and the American spirit will innovate and produce our way out of this energy crisis. We don’t need to consume less; we can have even more.”

    This narrative was more or less anathema to Carter, who complemented his push for energy independence with an insistence that Americans do their part and collectively sacrifice for the nation. Clad in a cardigan, he addressed the country two weeks after taking office and implored Americans to turn their thermostats down to “65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night” to address the ongoing natural gas shortages.

    At the same time, Carter was a contradictory figure who in some ways embodied aspects of each of the coalitions of his time — at once a big-government liberal and a deregulator; simultaneously the conservationist who fought the oil industry to preserve vast areas in Alaska and the energy hawk who expanded domestic coal production despite being aware of the science, already established, behind human-made global warming. “People often talk about Jimmy Carter the peanut farmer, but he’s also Jimmy Carter the nuclear engineer,” said Wellum.

    In some ways, Carter’s economic policy marked the turning point toward the era of neoliberalism — a transition that Wellum argues in his book Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis & the Making of Modern America was directly spurred by the oil crises of that decade. Driven by a belief in the efficiency of markets, Carter lifted the price controls on oil that Nixon had imposed in 1971 — a move characterized by critics at the time as a giveaway to the oil industry. 

    But Carter also signed the country’s first significant appliance efficiency standards into law, and invested unprecedented amounts of federal funds in energy research and development. These investments laid the groundwork for later breakthroughs, including the drilling technology behind hydraulic fracking, which enabled the U.S. shale boom in the 2000s. They also included a full-scale embrace of solar energy — a policy that, Hakes argued, “50 years from now, will be considered Carter’s major achievement.”

    A color photograph of protesters marching outside the White House. One man carries a sign reading Closed All Day due to U.S. Government Bungling. Another carries a sign with a caricature of Jimmy Carter's face and the words No Gas Call Jimmy.
    Protesters outside the White House blamed the Carter administration’s handling of the energy crisis for fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations. Wally McNamee / Corbis via Getty Images

    Carter characterized the nation’s need to secure and conserve its energy as the “moral equivalent of war” — a phrase derided in the press using its acronym, MEOW. The political problem was simple: “Hectoring the electorate in that way is not good politics,” said Wellum. Carter had already cemented the public image of himself as a preachy moralizer when things came to a turning point in 1979, with dramatic events in Iran.

    After the Islamic Revolution, another symbolic repudiation of American global hegemony, came a second oil shock — and more gas-station lines, which Hakes argued may have contributed even more to sinking Carter’s reelection than the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. “Carter’s poll ratings were lower in the spring of 1979 when we had the gasoline lines than they were later after the hostages were taken,” said Hakes.

    It was a perfect opportunity for a presidential candidate whose message to Americans was that they could have everything they wanted.

    “Reagan was the candidate who was optimistic about America, who would talk about how, if we can get government off your backs, we can liberate you ‘to do those things that I know you can do so well,’” said Wellum. “And Carter came across as this kind of moralizing guy, saying, ‘Americans have become decadent and no one’s listening to me.’”

    In the presidential debates, Wellum said, “Carter emphasized conservation, and Reagan was emphasizing how we can restore abundant American production in the future, as opposed to a more efficient, environmentally friendly future.”

    Reagan won the Electoral College by 489 votes to Carter’s 49. “At the popular level, that is a blow to the 70s as the environmental decade — the creation of the EPA, the Department of Energy, Earth Day in 1970,” said Welum. “There’s the backlash to that, the feeling that it’s anti-American, it’s anti-growth, it’s anti-freedom.”

    The lesson was heeded by politicians of all stripes. Hakes, whose books on energy policy include The Presidents And The Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush, said the word “sacrifice,” once a political cliché, almost completely disappeared from presidential speeches after Carter. Hakes puts this down partly to the fact that Carter was among the last presidents from a generation with a different attitude towards abundance and sacrifice. “The political leaders of that time generally had experienced World War II,” notes Hakes. (Carter was at the Naval Academy during the war and didn’t graduate in time to serve.)

    But for a few decades after Carter’s presidency, energy conservation became a nonissue in U.S. politics. Due in part to Carter and Reagan’s policies, as well as European and Japanese gas taxes, the world became far less reliant on Middle Eastern oil in the 1980s. Oil prices tanked in 1986 and remained low through the duration of the century.

    Needless to say, the importance of reducing oil consumption has since returned with a vengeance to the foreground of current affairs, fueled by climate crisis as well as new geopolitical conflicts. But we have yet to solve the issues that Carter confronted.

    Within the climate movement, self-described “ecomodernists” argue that environmentalism’s legacy of conservationism is an albatross that permanently tars it in the public eye with the unpopular politics of austerity, while proponents of “degrowth” insist on the need to focus on reducing consumption. For socialist critics of the environmental movement, meanwhile, the ingredient missing from its ability to persuade people to take climate change seriously is a class politics, given the levels of money and power invested in the status quo.

    “Environmental politics around energy, but also on climate, is really difficult to do, especially without some form of redistribution,” said Wellum — and the times feel bleak for those invested in this approach: “I’m pessimistic, or sad, that we don’t really know what to do around rethinking and reorganizing consumption, and the argument around redistribution seems even more in the wilderness,” Wellum said.

    To Hakes, the apparent defeat of Carter’s approach is tragic. “If climate change is a problem, people should feel under some moral obligation: I will turn off the lights, or I will obey the speed limit because I know that my pollution will be a lot less, or I will go out of my way to buy the most efficient appliances and automobiles that meet my needs and I can afford. Or maybe I’ll walk a mile to pick up something rather than drive,” Hakes said.

    “But politicians since Carter have not dared to say that, and maybe that’s a political reality we have to live with,” Hakes added. “One would assume that at this point people would say, ‘Our children and grandchildren deserve to have nature, and we shouldn’t be changing the environment pell-mell,’ and conservation would come back onto the agenda. I haven’t seen that yet. And I don’t even see seeds of that.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Energy is central to American politics. That all started with Jimmy Carter. on Jan 9, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • What’s missing from Biden’s offshore drilling ban? The western Gulf of Mexico.

    This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization with a mission to produce in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

    Environmental groups applauded President Joe Biden’s decision on Monday to enact a sweeping ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coastline. But the ban had one glaring omission: It didn’t include the western Gulf of Mexico, where the country extracts most of its offshore oil. 

    Aimed at safeguarding the environment and easing the harm caused by climate change, the ban will prohibit future oil and gas leasing in federal waters off the East and West coasts, in parts of the Bering Sea near Alaska and across the eastern portion of the Gulf. The exact boundaries haven’t been announced, but federal regulators generally define the eastern Gulf as the waters extending from the south tip of Florida to the Alabama line. That would leave the waters off Louisiana and Texas open to drilling. 

    “My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.” 

    Biden and other presidents have protected much smaller areas from oil and gas development, often with expiration dates. Monday’s action appears to be a permanent prohibition, though President-elect Donald Trump has already indicated he aims to “unban it immediately” after he takes office later this month. 

    “This is an epic ocean victory!” declared Joseph Gordon, a campaign director for Oceana, a nonprofit group focused on protecting the world’s oceans. 

    But some environmentalists weren’t as enthused. 

    “That’s great, but is the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico just a sacrifice zone, then?” asked Don Boesch, a marine scientist who served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which investigated the 2010 disaster. “That’s where all the [Outer Continental Shelf] drilling takes place and greenhouse gas emissions come from.”

    The Gulf accounts for 97 percent of all oil and natural gas production in U.S. offshore waters. The vast majority of this production happens near Louisiana and Texas — not the Florida coast, which would be protected by Biden. 

    The oil and gas industry blasted the ban as misguided and potentially harmful to the economy.

    “Though not directly affecting the western Gulf of Mexico, [the ban] is a blatant attack on the oil and natural gas industry — an industry vital to our nation’s energy security and economic strength,” said Tommy Faucheux, president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group.

    But Boesch noted few oil companies are clamoring to drill off the the oil-poor East or West coasts or Florida’s Gulf Coast. 

    “The ban would not affect oil leasing in the Central and Western Gulf where essentially all drilling takes place or is likely to take place over next 4 years,” Boesch wrote on X. 

    It’s unclear if or how quickly Trump, a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry, will act on his promise to undo the ban. But some experts say overturning it could be time-consuming, complicated and may require action from Congress. The courts could also weigh in. In 2019, a federal judge ruled that presidents can block drilling but they can’t revoke past bans.

    Trump hasn’t always opposed limits on offshore drilling. During his re-election campaign in 2020, Trump extended a drilling moratorium off Florida’s Gulf Coast and expanded it to include the state’s Atlantic Coast and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.

    “This protects your beautiful gulf and your beautiful ocean, and it will for a long time to come,” Trump said in 2020.

    On Monday, Biden evoked the Deepwater Horizon oil spill when announcing the new ban, saying the disaster is a “solemn reminder of the costs and risks of offshore drilling.” 

    The spill killed 11 workers and released four million barrels of oil into the Gulf off the coast of Louisiana over 87 days. Biden said the disaster “underscores the importance of the legal protections I am putting in place today.”

    But the ban does little to protect the Gulf from future spills, said Martha Collins, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Healthy Gulf.

    “We are disappointed that President Biden did not take the opportunity to withdraw additional areas in the Gulf of Mexico, particularly the risky deepwater regions and the western Gulf,” she said. “These areas remain vulnerable to catastrophic oil spills.”

    Marine animals are still suffering from the Deepwater Horizon disaster nearly 15 years later. Last month, a study led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that some whale species densities in the Gulf have declined by 83 percent since the disaster. Many of the whales found in the Gulf are threatened or endangered. 

    “I’m frustrated that many places left out [of the ban] are where offshore drilling does the most harm to Gulf communities and endangered species,” said Brady Bradshaw, an oceans campaign manager with the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit group focused on wildlife conservation. “This was a missed opportunity to protect the Western and Central Gulf.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s missing from Biden’s offshore drilling ban? The western Gulf of Mexico. on Jan 8, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Will the world fall in love with nuclear power once more?

    The Simpsons did nuclear power dirty. With towers looming over Springfield, three-eyed fish swimming the lake, and an inept Homer running things, the show’s nuclear power plant is a perpetual existential risk. It’s a reliable running gag to be sure, but also a reflection of a society that’s soured on what used to be the bountiful energy of the future.

    That turn has put human civilization in a pickle. The costs of renewables like wind and solar have fallen so sharply in recent years it’s caught even researchers off guard. Day by day, electric utilities around the United States are finding clever ways to store that energy, like tapping into idled electric school buses and using the earth itself as a giant battery. Still, humans can’t make the sun always shine and the wind always blow, so currently utilities have to burn planet-warming natural gas in power plants when renewables aren’t available.

    Nuclear power plants generate electricity cleanly and reliably, but the technology has fallen out of favor. “When nuclear power burst on the scene, it was the first time that we would break with scarcity that we had known throughout human history,” said environmental journalist Marco Visscher, author of the book The Power of Nuclear: The Rise, Fall and Return of Our Mightiest Energy Source, publishing today. “This abundant energy source bloomed, and this was nothing less than a revolution.”

    Through the early 1980s, operators started construction on an average of 19 new reactors a year. But as Visscher recounts, a variety of factors conspired to turn nuclear power from a miracle technology into a villain — and the butt of Simpsons jokes — thanks in large part to Chernobyl and other accidents. By the 1990s, new projects dropped to just a handful each year. Now, though, nuclear is once again having a moment, potentially working alongside renewables to accelerate the decarbonization of the grid, or even power data centers and artificial intelligence models. Grist sat down with Visscher to talk about the technology’s roller coaster history. 

    This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

    Q. Going back to the early history of nuclear energy, it started with the horrific use of atomic weapons against Japan. It transformed into this technology that in its early days, people really did think was going to be the future of energy. 

    A. When the first nuclear plants opened in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were these grand promises: It’s clean, it’s cheap, it’s modern. It could power plants for desalination, so there would be plenty of clean water around the world. It could produce fertilizer on a large scale, so that yields would be much higher. Nuclear energy could provide the fuel for trains and ships and airplanes. 

    Q. A section of the book talks about regulation becoming a problem, but not in the way people might think. Perhaps there was an overabundance of caution that started to turn nuclear power into something the public should worry about.

    A. Regulation of nuclear power came through fears of exposure to radiation. These fears had originally everything to do with fear of nuclear war and the fear that people would get sick from the fallout. When nuclear plants were being built, people started to wonder: Isn’t that a source of radiation as well? Couldn’t their radiation somehow escape? Or if an accident occurs, what if it could explode like a bomb? In the ‘50s and 1960s, there was a call for more regulation, and the regulation was all about keeping radiation as low as reasonably achievable.

    The focus became on safety, and the safety limits for a safe dose got lowered over and over again. Meanwhile, the coal industry, for instance, didn’t have all these regulations, nor did natural gas plants. So those industries could innovate, they could become more effective. But the nuclear power industry seemed sort of paralyzed by this narrow focus on bringing down any possible exposure to radiation.

    Q. On top of that, we have a few disasters — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. But you argue in the book that among energy disasters — especially considering the ravages of climate change, brought about by the burning of fossil fuels — they were used to further beat down the nuclear industry.

    A. Chernobyl was, of course, a unique design, in unique circumstances. But those reactors have no similarities to the reactors used in the U.S. at that time, but still, reactors in the U.S. had to go through multiple safety updates. It brought in money for some companies working in the nuclear sector, but it didn’t make the nuclear power plant any safer.

    All these fears and all the suspicions gave rise to the idea that any accident in a nuclear power plant must be some kind of apocalypse. But the reality is much more mundane. It’s nothing like the fantasies that we have in our heads. You just called Three Mile Island a disaster, but really the radiation that was leaked into the environment was so low it didn’t cause any health effects. 

    In Fukushima, nobody died of radiation. Nobody will die of radiation. This is the scientific consensus on Fukushima: There’s no discernible increase in cancer or in birth defects or heart attacks or deformities in coming generations. 

    But these accidents didn’t help the nuclear industry to move on. After Fukushima, Germany decided to close down its nuclear reactors one by one. Japan did the same. Accidents rarely happen, but they have a huge impact.

    Q. As the world turned on nuclear power and started decommissioning plants, we had to get that electricity somehow, and it was largely from natural gas. Can you talk about that missed opportunity, that transition, and our doubling down on natural gas as we’re waiting for renewables to ramp up?

    A. What typically happens when a nuclear plant closes, a natural gas plant opens later on. Nuclear is a competitor to coal and natural gas, not so much to renewables, and this is simply because a nuclear power plant can be turned on and off, just like a coal plant and a natural gas plant. They work when you want, basically, and this is different with renewables like wind and solar that are dependent on the weather.

    Q. You write that renewables can’t provide reliable power on their own. But utilities are finding more ways to store that energy in battery banks and other long-duration energy storage systems. Is there not a future where we can rely on renewables exclusively? Do we need nuclear?

    A. Maybe one day it will be possible to run the entire world on renewables. I think it makes so much more sense to look at a proven technology that is available and that has shown that it can decarbonize the economy of a modern society. 

    Of course, nuclear power and wind and solar can work together, right? All societies, all economies, need base load power so there is a continuous, available, reliable source of energy that ensures there is enough electricity to meet demand. There is energy poverty in the world, and there will be such a rising demand for electricity in the next decades,

    Q. Unlike fossil fuels, which are stagnant — there’s really no improving natural gas or coal — many companies are working on things like small modular nuclear reactors. Do you think that will help nuclear power grow once again?

    A. Some of these designs are intended for remote areas. Others are designed for coastal cities. All of them are said to be cheaper, of course — more efficient, easier to build. They’re safer. Some say they require less uranium and produce less waste.

    But I was thinking: Why exactly do we need innovation? And it seemed to me that many of these innovations are designed to comfort people. Reactors should be smaller because we don’t like things to be big — small is beautiful, that’s an environmental credo. We love hearing that it is safer — at least some of the startups think so — because we think that nuclear power is so dangerous. 

    I don’t want to be too cynical or skeptical about small modular reactors. I think they serve a purpose. They may have a psychological effect, because small modular reactors may allow long-time critics of nuclear power to ease up, to open up. Those are reactors I’m okay with.

    Q. What, in your opinion, does the world risk by not going all in on nuclear?

    A. We are going to have to live with climate change anyway. I don’t think nuclear or any technology can stop global warming, to the extent that we do not feel the consequences anymore. That doesn’t mean that we’re screwed, and that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to do anything. It means we’ll have to step up and do much more. 

    It would be ridiculous not to use nuclear power. It would be a crime to close down nuclear power plants that function perfectly fine, as they have done in Germany, but also in other countries. And I think there should be much more of an awareness eventually in politics that we can beat the fossil fuel industry if we really expand our nuclear fleet.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will the world fall in love with nuclear power once more? on Jan 7, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Developers eye Louisiana, Texas coasts for offshore carbon storage

    The fishers in Gulf of Mexico waters off Cameron Parish, Louisiana, estimate their catch has fallen catastrophically from 1 million tons a season to 150,000 tons since the first liquefied natural gas terminal in the parish began operating eight years ago.

    Now, a new industry is being developed in the waters that were once the most productive grounds in the nation for fish, shrimp, and oysters. 

    A company called OnStream CO2 is developing the GeoDura hub, which it says could hold millions of tons of carbon dioxide captured from fossil fuel industries, including LNG terminals, a mile or more below the waters off Cameron Parish’s shores. It would be among the first of its kind in the United States. Currently, there are just a handful of projects in the world developing offshore carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.

    “These people are book smart, but when it comes to common sense, they have nothing,” said Travis Dardar about the project. Dardar is a Cameron-based fisher and founder of the group Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage, or FISH.

    According to a report from the Center for International Environmental Law, in the best-case scenario, the injection of captured carbon may temporarily disrupt fisheries because of drilling and seismic testing. 

    In the worst-case scenario, underwater carbon sequestration wells could fail and release the stored carbon, killing off the plants, fish, and even the people in boats in the waters above. Storing carbon also has potential global implications, if, as opponents claim, carbon capture and sequestration will allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain the status quo as one of the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gasses.

    A man fishes in Sabine Pass in Texas, across from a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas docked at Cheniere’s LNG export facility in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, in June 2024.
    Julie Dermansky / Julie Dermansky LLC

    The federal government, which is supporting the GeoDura hub with a recently announced $26 million award, and geologists who have studied carbon storage say offshore sequestration projects make a lot of sense.

    But as with other climate change mitigation efforts supported by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law — such as hydrogen and direct air capture — the effectiveness of offshore carbon storage is unclear. Worries and claims on both sides of the offshore carbon capture debate are mostly hypothetical, based on modeling and just a few existing offshore storage sites. 

    Gulf offshore carbon storage pushed 

    The geology of the Gulf of Mexico combined with the fossil fuel-heavy industries along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas make carbon capture and sequestration under the Gulf “the single best opportunity for developing a CCS industry in the United States that can effectively address national emission reduction strategies at the required scale,” University of Texas at Austin research scientist Tip Meckel told a congressional committee in 2022.

    Acknowledging that potential, Congress directed federal agencies to develop regulations to permit carbon storage under federal offshore waters. Draft regulations, requested by November 2022, have yet to be issued. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management told Floodlight it will issue its first draft of a proposed rule this year.

    In the meantime, companies have focused on developing carbon storage in the state waters off Louisiana, stretching 3.5 miles from the shore, and Texas, which controls the waters for about 10 miles from the shoreline.

    Meckel says there are 10 proposed projects in the two states, including GeoDura. Louisiana, unlike Texas, has the authority to permit carbon storage underground, including under state waters.

    Abandoned, idle, and unused wells are a recognized risk for offshore carbon storage, just as it is onshore.
    Ocean Conservancy Report: Protecting the Ocean and Taxpayers by Strengthening Standards for Offshore Oil and Gas Decommissioning

    But the development of carbon storage in waters near the coast raises concerns about the higher number of abandoned, idle, or older oil and gas wells closer to shore that could allow stored carbon to leak out through existing wells. There are also questions about whether Louisiana would do a good job permitting and regulating carbon storage.

    “I can’t say it cannot be done, but the history of this technology, the history of the lack of pollution monitoring in the Gulf and in Louisiana waters in particular, we are extremely skeptical,” said Scott Eustis, community science director for Healthy Gulf, a Louisiana-based community and environmental advocacy group.

    Land grabs onshore and off

    The concept of storing carbon under offshore waters was supercharged by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which increased tax credits for capturing and permanently storing carbon underground from $39 per ton to $85. The incentive spurred a rush of development in the United States, with about 125 new carbon capture, transport, or storage projects announced since 2022, according to the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that focuses on solutions to the climate crisis.

    The incentives also sparked a land grab in Louisiana and Texas, with companies competing to purchase rights for underground storage onshore, often acquiring multiple parcels from multiple landowners to have access to a single deep reservoir for carbon storage.

    With offshore sites, though, a developer usually only has to deal with a single landowner, the state or federal government. 

    A diagram showing the transport overview for carbon capture in the Gulf
    Offshore carbon storage projects, like the GeoDura hub proposed off Cameron Parish, Louisiana, would receive carbon captured from industrial facilities and piped to their sites to be injected a mile or more below ground.
    Global CCS Institute

    In August 2023, Castex Carbon Solutions signed an agreement with Louisiana for the rights to store carbon underneath 24,000 acres off Cameron Parish, around Monkey Island, at an initial cost of $7.25 million. Additional millions will flow to the state when the project begins injecting carbon. Castex is one of the partners of the GeoDura hub, along with Carbonvert and Enbridge.

    The OnStream CO2 collaboration says the hub will have the capacity to store 250 million metric tons of captured carbon, or the annual emissions from 58 million gas-powered cars. It has signed a contract with Commonwealth LNG in Cameron Parish to store the 9 million tons of carbon Commonwealth expects to capture each year from its terminal after it is operational.

    Venture Global has signed similar, but less initially lucrative, contracts with the state to store captured carbon from its Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines LNG facilities under waters off Calcasieu Parish and Barataria Bay, respectively.

    The carbon captured from an LNG terminal, which super chills and liquefies natural gas for transport, equals just about 8.8 percent of the carbon emissions created by the LNG industry, according to a lifecycle analysis published by Cornell University Professor Robert Howarth. Howarth’s study, which has been attacked by oil and gas companies and House Republicans, concluded that LNG is worse for the climate than burning coal.

    Offshore CCS raises a litany of concerns

    OnStream says its project will be operational in 2028. In addition to completing a geologic assessment of the site — funded in part by the Department of Energy grant — the company will need to build a pipeline to move captured carbon from the nearby industrial hubs of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Port Arthur, Texas. It will also need to obtain a permit to inject the carbon from the state of Louisiana.

    Louisiana is the third state, and the first with a coastline, to receive permission from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to permit carbon sequestration wells. Patrick Courreges, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources, said the state will be examining the same things in offshore carbon sequestration projects as it does for the onshore projects.

    “What our folks are looking for is confining layers,” he said. “Clay, shale, something real thick and non-permeable that’s not going to allow anything to bubble up past it. Whether you’re offshore, onshore, that geology below ground is what we’re looking at.” 

    The state will also examine the construction of wells and pipes to move the carbon, he said, adding that the offshore wells also will have to be built to handle hurricanes and storm surges.

    Another concern, acknowledged by both sides, is the possibility the injected carbon will come back out through abandoned, idle, or older wells. Such concentrated carbon could kill vegetation, sea life, and possibly even the fishers in the waters above.

    The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, or NETL, has issued contracts to study possible offshore carbon capture and sequestration sites in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.
    NETL

    Debra James, a spokesperson for OnStream, told Floodlight there are no existing wells directly above the storage site.

    “Technical evaluations show that the CO2 will not interact with wellbores near the project area,” she said.

    Environmental advocates have a litany of other concerns, including that drilling and the injection of carbon could cause seismic activity in the region, a hotspot of industry. Meckel told Floodlight that “we do not anticipate much induced seismicity.”

    These advocates are also concerned the storage of carbon under or near coastal marshes could damage the thousands of acres of wetlands along the Louisiana coast, which are already disappearing at a rate of 25 to 35 square miles a year.

    Louisiana “is spending millions of dollars to protect the coast in one area, and then another area, they’re permitting the wholesale destruction of it. That is just totally inconsistent,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the environmental group Louisiana Bucket Brigade.

    Brian Lezina, chief of planning for the Louisiana Coastal Restoration Protection Authority, said it’s the responsibility of the state’s Department of Energy and Natural Resources to ensure carbon storage along the state shorelines is done correctly. He added that the coastal agency — which has a stalled $3 billion project to help rebuild wetlands in Barataria Bay — will be paying attention to the activity.

    Technology largely untested 

    There are just a handful of operating subsea carbon sequestration projects in the world, and none in the United States.

    Two offshore carbon storage projects off Norway’s coast have been called a success. But in 2023, the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis published a study pointing out that even in those two projects — in what the institute called some of the most studied offshore waters — the storage of carbon yielded some unwelcome surprises.

    In one of the fields, the carbon unexpectedly migrated out of where it was injected, though it has remained underground. Injection into a second field had to be halted when the reservoir reached capacity 15 years before anticipated.

    The research “has revealed that storing carbon dioxide underground is not an exact science,” the report said. “It may carry even more risk and uncertainty than drilling for oil or gas, given the very limited practical, long-term experience of permanently keeping CO2 in the ground.”

    Dardar hasn’t followed the offshore carbon debate closely. But the way he sees it, the presence of any more industry in his corner of Louisiana is “just no good, all the way around.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Developers eye Louisiana, Texas coasts for offshore carbon storage on Jan 5, 2025.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Pam Radtke, Floodlight.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • As states line up to battle Trump over climate, Pennsylvania could be on the sidelines

    As President-elect Donald Trump takes direct aim at federal climate policy, states and their attorneys general are preparing to fight back. In California, the governor has asked legislators for $25 million to fight off any effort by Trump to upend the state’s climate-friendly initiatives. In Washington, voters doubled down on the state’s landmark climate policy, and Jay Inslee — the outgoing governor — said his successor is set to work hard to protect the state from a fossil fuel-friendly president.

    But in Pennsylvania, one of the largest energy producers in the country where voters narrowly voted for Trump, it’s unclear just how stiff that resistance will be if the incoming president follows through with his vows to shred President Biden’s environmental agenda and cancel funds for clean energy projects.

    One clue might be found in the person voters elected as the state’s new attorney general — Dave Sunday, a Republican who was largely silent on environmental issues during the run-up to the election but drew on a large infusion of money tied to the fossil fuel industry to propel his campaign.  

    And while Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro took on the oil and gas industry and then-president Trump while he was attorney general, one of Sunday’s first moves was to name a noted oil and gas booster to his transition team.

    State campaign finance records and Internal Revenue Service filings show that Sunday accepted direct contributions from a tax-exempt association tied to the fossil fuel industry called the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA. 

    Some $550,000 in direct contributions flowed to Sunday through the Keystone Prosperity PAC, a political action committee created by RAGA. In 2024, RAGA received at least $1.6 million from fossil fuel and petrochemical companies, utilities, and trade groups, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips Chemical, the National Mining Association, the American Gas Association, and the American Petroleum Institute. 

    The Republican Attorneys General Association also received contributions from smaller fossil fuel interests with Pennsylvania-specific operations. Diversified Oil and Gas Co., which owns a slew of low-producing oil and gas wells, many in Pennsylvania, and which has come under fire for its financial reporting mechanisms, donated $15,000 to RAGA in June. Equitrans, which recently merged with Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, contributed $50,000 in April. RAGA then donated funds to Sunday in two payments: $400,000 in July and $150,000 in September. These marked the two largest donations to Sunday’s campaign in 2024, according to data through September 24.

    “RAGA’s early engagement in Pennsylvania paid dividends and proved to be one of our wisest investments to date,” Republican Attorneys General Association Executive Director Peter Bisbee said in a statement following Sunday’s victory. The organization, he said, “made a record investment in Pennsylvania” last year.  

    Sunday also received a handful of direct contributions from oil and gas-related entities, including $10,000 from the Koch Industries PAC; $1,500 from the Pennsylvania Grade Crude Oil Coalition; $1,000 from midstream oil and gas firm Energy Transfer; and $1,000 from the Pennsylvania Coal PAC. 

    “While we Pennsylvanians go about our lives, we hope our government is working to protect us from drinking and breathing toxic chemicals,” said Michael Bagdes-Canning, a member of Pennsylvania Action on Climate, a grassroots coalition of climate and anti-corruption advocates. “But in Harrisburg [the state capital], the fossil fuel industries are busy, behind the scenes and undercover, converting their enormous wealth into the political power they need to protect and enlarge that wealth.” 

    Capital & Main reached out to Sunday’s campaign and did not hear back by publication time. 

    Among those Sunday tapped to help in his transition as the state’s first Republican attorney general in 12 years is former Governor Tom Corbett, who became known for his pro-drilling stance during the state’s fracking boom. Prior to his tenure as governor, Corbett served as attorney general and, while in office, accepted gifts tied to the oil and gas industry.

    From California to Pennsylvania, the role of a state’s top law enforcement official could be critical for states that intend to fight Trump’s promises to strip away regulations and initiatives designed to speed the transition away from fossil fuels.  

    “When people who care about the environment and climate lose the presidency to someone who obviously is about as radically against action on environment and climate as you could possibly be, then we turn to states,” said Joseph Romm, senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. 

    As some line up to litigate against Trump’s policies, as well as corporations that violate laws in their states, the Republican attorneys general that are active in RAGA are likely to take a different tack. 

    The Republican Attorneys General Association was established in 1999 with the aim of electing Republicans to attorney general seats across the nation and “defending the rule of law,” its website states. The organization currently has 28 member states, though Pennsylvania is not yet one of them. Shapiro was attorney general until 2022, and Democrat Michelle Henry assumed office in an acting role in January 2023. She opted not to run for office in 2024, which opened the gates for a crowded primary.  

    RAGA has spearheaded legal challenges to major environmental rules over the course of Biden’s term. It also led a robocall campaign four years ago urging attendance at the January 6 rally in Washington, D.C., which devolved into the attack on the Capitol. The organization receives contributions from industry and companies of all sizes, many that earn invitations to national conferences where they can get face time with attorneys general. Access to the conferences is tiered by the amount a donor gives. In a 2018 list of the perks, $15,000 earned a company two passes, while $125,000 earned five passes, invitations to dinners and club events, and the opportunity to sit on panels, among other rewards. 

    “What you have is state attorneys general who aren’t actually ever even assessing what the ordinary people in the state want,” said Lisa Graves, founder of True North Research, a political watchdog research firm. “Instead [they] are rubbing elbows, hanging out, going on these little mini-vacations with these industry lobbyists who get exclusive opportunities to bend their ear.”  

    The Republican Attorneys General Association does not file records of its contributions to the Federal Election Commission, but to the IRS. These donations can then be given to individual candidates in contentious attorneys general races across states, thus obscuring their origins. There’s little way for an outsider to know if one company intended for its RAGA donation to go to a particular attorney general candidate, for instance. 

    “I think they’re trying to obfuscate their involvement,” Romm said of companies that donate money through RAGA. 

    In 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that, when giving to the counterpart Democratic and Republican governors’ associations, which function similarly to RAGA, donors have the ability to informally earmark their donations for a specific candidate. 

    “RAGA is one tentacle of the effort by right-wing billionaires and the fossil fuel industry to capture our courts and government to the benefit of big corporate interests,” U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, told The Guardian in August.

    Keystone Prosperity PAC’s donations to Sunday represented around 26 percent of his overall direct contributions and 83 percent of his direct contributions from political action committees. Spotlight Pennsylvania reported in October that Keystone Prosperity PAC also spent $5.4 million running ads on Sunday’s behalf, calling his opponent, Eugene DePasquale, “out of touch” and chiding him for his stance on immigration and police reform. The PAC’s spending levels raised alarm bells within the DePasquale campaign that Sunday hadn’t been forthcoming about the sources of the donations. 

    DePasquale, for his part, received around $1.6 million from the Democratic Attorneys General Association, which received contributions from some of the same fossil fuel entities that donated to RAGA, albeit in smaller volumes. Where the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers gave $92,500 to RAGA, for instance, it gave $25,000 to DAGA. Where the American Gas Association gave $40,000 to RAGA, to DAGA it gave just $15,000. 

    Sunday’s campaign platform offered no indication of a specific tack he will take on climate. The Harrisburg native campaigned primarily on a “tough on crime” platform to reduce prison recidivism and address the state’s opioid crisis through a philosophy of “accountability and redemption.” 

    DePasquale once served as deputy secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection and, in 2019, authored a report that found that climate change had cost Pennsylvania hundreds of millions of dollars per year. That made the attorney general’s race in Pennsylvania one of the most important for climate in the nation, according to E&E News.

    So, where do state environmental groups go from here? 

    “We’re going to sort of remain positive and optimistic, until we have reason not to,” said Jen Quinn, Sierra Club Pennsylvania’s legislative and political director, of Sunday’s election. Even so, she said having an environmental champion at the helm of the attorney general’s office might have served as a deterrent to polluters — it’s yet unclear whether Sunday will fill that role. 

    “Just having someone in there that is going to be strong on certain issues, I think, is helpful,” Quinn said. “If we’re seeing a lot of special interest money going to support him, then you just have to wonder, what are the long-term implications of that?”

    Copyright 2024 Capital & Main

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As states line up to battle Trump over climate, Pennsylvania could be on the sidelines on Jan 4, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Midwest Wins Funding For A New Hydrogen Hub

    The U.S. Department of Energy is rolling out the first installment of its $1 billion commitment to ramp up clean hydrogen production in the Midwest, part of a bid by the Biden administration to lock in a nationwide roadmap for decarbonization.

    The Midwest Hydrogen Hub, which is set to span Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan, was awarded $22.2 million late last month as part of a billion-dollar federal cost-share grant through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The hub “aims to decarbonize a variety of industries such as manufacturing, steel and glass production, power generation, refining, and heavy-duty transportation through the use of clean hydrogen,” according to a Department of Energy factsheet.

    The post Midwest Wins Funding For A New Hydrogen Hub appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.