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On emergency shelters, Biden’s climate legacy, and Europe’s deadly floods
Current conditions: Large hail stones pelted Oklahoma City • A month’s worth of rain fell over 24 hours in parts of England, with more rain on the way • A wildfire is raging near the capital of Ecuador, which is experiencing the worst drought in six decades.
President Biden touted his administration's climate legacy yesterday at the Bloomberg Global Business forum as part of Climate Week. The speech was a comprehensive list of his climate and clean energy accomplishments, starting with the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden called the most significant climate law ever passed in the history of the world. “We were told it couldn’t get done but we did it,” he said. He tied climate policy to economic growth and job creation. “In just two years since the Inflation Reduction Act, we’ve created more than 330,000 clean energy jobs,” he said. Some other crowd pleasers from the speech:
Biden closed his remarks with a warning that former President Donald Trump would undo much of this progress if elected again in November. He urged the business leaders in the room to keep the momentum going. “It’s a perfect time to go big. The market for clean energy is booming … I’m doing my part and I’m calling on other companies and the capital in the room to invest more and do more. Now’s the time. We can do this. We really can. We owe it to our children.”
Tropical Storm Helene is forecast to strengthen into a large, major hurricane later today and make landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast tomorrow. A hurricane warning is in effect for Florida's Big Bend. Some coastal regions are evacuating, and flooding is expected in Georgia and Alabama, as well. Reutersreported that oil producers including BP, Chevron, Equinor, and Shell are evacuating staff from platforms in the Gulf.
The NFL and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are partnering to make football stadiums available as emergency disaster shelters year-round, according toThe Washington Post. The NFL reportedly approached FEMA with the idea three years ago. “It just made perfect sense,” said FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell. “We have all of these existing venues. How do we better coordinate during these blue sky days to better understand what they bring to the table and what we can use them for in the future?” Three stadiums are already on board: New York’s MetLife Stadium, Pittsburgh’s Acrisure Stadium, and Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium. The Post reported that L.A.’s SoFi Stadium is expected to sign on soon, and Criswell hopes the MLB and other sports leagues will also join the initiative.
European Union emissions targets “often lack the flexibility necessary for effective decarbonization at the national level,” according to a report released today by Third Way’s Carbon-Free Europe and Evolved Energy Research. By mapping existing clean energy infrastructure for each member state “down to each kilometer,” the researchers found that “hitting sector- and tech-specific deployment targets does not necessarily equate to hitting emissions targets,” Lindsey Walter, the co-founder of the Carbon-Free Europe initiative, told Heatmap.
For example, the report found that EU policy needs to be more aggressive in deploying solar energy, while other 2030 targets, such as clean hydrogen, are likely to outpace demand as the transport and industry uses continue to develop and petroleum refineries, one of the primary uses today, are in decline. By looking more deeply at various net-zero pathways for each member state, the report proposes a “more flexible framework” for keeping countries competitive via individualized net-zero strategies. “Ultimately, we think the future energy mix will be determined strictly by economics,” Walter said. “What our study is finding is that land use trade-offs will likely be just as big — if not a bigger — factor in the ultimate energy mix in Europe.” Particularly in countries like the U.K., France, and Italy, there is the potential for significant on- and off-shore wind and solar in some of the models: “We’re not talking about building the next 10 wind or solar farms — we’re talking about the next 1,000,” Walter went on. “And it is quite significant when you look at it on the ground.”
In case there was any doubt, researchers from World Weather Attribution confirmed that climate change contributed to the severity of the heavy rain and flooding that Storm Boris brought to central Europe this month. The group analyzed climate models and historical data and found that human-caused climate change has made rainfall events like these twice as likely and 20% more intense since the pre-industrial era. The rain was “by far the heaviest ever recorded” in the area, and left at least 24 people dead. “Yet again, these floods highlight the devastating results of fossil fuel-driven warming,” said Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at Imperial College London and one of the contributors to the report.
“A lot of energy performance improvements to houses right now are on sale, and they're going to be on sale until the end of the decade.” –Eric Werling, former national director of the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Homes program, speaking to Heatmap’s Katie Brigham about the benefits of home weatherization.
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It will get better, but until then, the dongles are killing me.
Last year, a great streamlining of electric vehicle charging infrastructure looked imminent. One by one, the major automakers committed to using the North American Charging Standard, or NACS, which was formerly Tesla’s proprietary plug. The moves would allow EV drivers of all stripes to use Tesla’s Supercharger network and would move the industry toward a single standard where things worked seamlessly. Earlier this month, GM joined the ranks of Ford and Rivian in having its vehicles officially able to visit nearly 18,000 Supercharger stations.
All of the GM vehicles built up to this point, however, carry the previous charging standard for non-Tesla EVs. You know what that means: dongles.
Drivers in combustion cars choose between regular, plus, and premium gas, but they don’t worry that they’ll pull into a station and the pump won’t fit their car. EVs, meanwhile, still have to deal with a mess of competing plug standards and confusing customer interfaces at charging stations. This situation is the inescapable result of a fast-moving, fledgling industry, yes. But the complexity is an annoyingly sticky barrier to EV adoption.
The adapter necessary to make a GM EV work with a Tesla plug, for instance, is available. But there’s a waiting list, and the piece costs $225 — effectively a $225 early adopter penalty for buying your EV back before everyone agreed on how to cooperate. When Ford transitioned to NACS earlier this year, it had difficulty extracting enough adapters from Tesla to meet the demand, dragging out the process for months for some of its EV drivers. GM had been slated to join the Supercharger network months earlier and could not because of the dongle delays.
Not all the eligible cars just work, either. After GM electric vehicles were welcomed to Tesla Superchargers, it turned out that lots of Chevrolet Bolts made in 2019 and 2020 (when they were the best-selling non-Tesla EVs) needed to visit the dealership for a software update before they could link up with a Tesla plug.
Software patches and dongles may be an annoyance, a kind of Band-Aid to make two systems that weren’t meant to work together play nice, but at least a quick fix is possible. A bigger issue for streamlining charging stations is that the locations of charging ports on EVs themselves are far from standardized.
All Tesla models have ports in the rear on the driver’s side; Supercharging stations are typically built for drivers to back in and then find the appropriate cord right next to their charging port. A Chevy Bolt’s port, however, is found on the driver’s side but on the front. A Hyundai Ioniq 5’s is in the back, but on the passenger side. When Rivian revealed the R2 and R3 designs, their ports were on the passenger side rear because the brand thought that location would fit into its existing network of chargers and make it easier to plug into street-side plugs. Then came an outcry from fans distraught at how difficult it would be to use a Tesla Supercharger if the port were on the wrong side and the cable had to wrap all the way around the back of the vehicle. Rivian changed its mind.
Thank goodness for that, because the situation at Superchargers is poised to get messy. I’ve been to ones where Tesla plugs were available, but I could not park my Model 3 within reach of one because other EVs parked incorrectly in order to plug in. Tesla’s lead engineer for the Cybertruck had to warn people not to use extension cords at Superchargers since that might lead to electrical shorts.
Some relief is on the way. In the coming years, most car companies will build the NACS standard into their electric vehicles, negating the need for expensive adapters and dongles. With so much emphasis on using the Supercharger network, it’s likely the brands will feel pressure to follow Rivian’s lead and just put the port where Tesla puts it.
But then there’s the last piece of the puzzle: the interface. Tesla beat the competition at charging not only by building a bigger and far more reliable network, but also by inventing a seamless way to pay for electricity: When you plug in, the system knows it’s your car and charges the credit card on file. Non-Tesla drivers are beginning to experience this convenience when they stop at the Supercharger.
Competing systems, though, rely on a variety of phone apps that may or may not work, especially in places with spotty cell coverage. Tech companies are trying to solve this problem with, you guessed it, AI. Revel, which used to offer rentable mopeds around New York City, has tried to reposition itself as an EV charging company. It just partnered with a computer vision company to announce a kind of facial recognition system for your car so that the charging station knows it’s you.
Of course, one could just copy Tesla’s idea and have the charging cord auto-identify each vehicle, or even simply install a camera to read the car’s license plate instead of overcomplicating the basic task of IDing a car. But those solutions don’t use the magic technology of the moment.
Conservationists won the last round, but this time the stakes involve new renewables technology.
The future of floating offshore wind in America rests on a feud between YIMBY state officials and a government whistleblower over a bucolic island off the coast of Maine. I have no clue who will win.
Floating offshore wind is Maine’s best bet for wind power in deeper stretches of ocean, far away from beach views, coastal properties, and valuable fishing grounds. The tech — which other countries have tried to deploy but is still unproven at large commercial scale — offers a hypothetical panacea for the sorts of conflicts that often stymie offshore wind, and other states are looking to it as a solution for these thorny issues, including California.
But Maine has chosen to construct its floating offshore wind turbine assembly site at Sears Island, a naturalist tourist destination in Penobscot Bay. Conservationists in New England have fought for a long time to preserve the island, an incredibly biodiverse ecosystem rich with wetlands, from the Maine Department of Transportation, which over decades has attempted to use a section of the island for various forms of infrastructure, including an industrial port.
Now that this longstanding conflict has become intertwined with the cause of carbon reduction, it is pitting an older generation of eco-warriors against a younger breed of climate activists, as well as local unions eager to get in on energy transition jobs. Unfortunately for Maine regulators, one of the old heads opposing this project is Kyla Bennett, a former wetlands permitting staffer at the Environmental Protection Agency who stopped a previous effort by the Maine Department of Transportation to build a port at Sears Island in the 1990s.
At EPA, Bennett determined that constructing the port would’ve been illegal under the Clean Water Act because of the sheer proliferation of obvious wetlands. When political officials interceded and reassigned her to a different job, she blew the whistle on them — and won, winning back her post. The port permits were also denied.
Bennett is now a key organizer for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization that represents whistleblowers doing environmental protection work in government. And she’s making it a hobby horse to, again, stop Sears Island from becoming a port — even if it’s in the name of developing technology that could stem the tide of climate change.
“It’s déjà vu. It’s really disturbing to me that it’s back and we have to do this all over again,” she told me.
The facility has to go somewhere because, well, the technicians and researchers need a place to build these turbines, and Maine has claimed that no port existing today on the East Coast fits the precise spacing and resource needs. Habib Dagher, a University of Maine professor who leads the consortium plotting a U.S. offshore wind industry, told me constructing a port for assembly is “critical” to near-term success.
Yet there is another option. Moffat and Nichols, the engineering firm that studied port locations for Maine regulators, did conclude Mack Point, an existing import terminal on the coast of the Penobscot owned by Sprague Energy, would also fit the bill. Sprague is proposing to pay for a large expansion of Mack Point to take this floating offshore wind business off of Sears Island. Not only does it already have existing rail infrastructure and a long history of working in energy and construction but crucially, the engineering firm also found that siting the assembly facility there would shave years off the permitting and construction timetable for making floating offshore wind a reality.
Legally, this alternative matters, and federal regulators will decide who wins this fight. Maine regulators are expected to submit paperwork to begin the permitting process under the National Environmental Policy Act for building the assembly site at Sears Island in the coming weeks. As they do so, they will be required to explain how this plan offers the “least environmentally damaging practicable alternative” under environmental law. And Bennett is confident their claims will not pass muster in court, if not with career EPA staff.
“It cannot be legally permitted,” she confessed. “We will sue them.”
So I sought out to answer this pesky question: Why is Maine trying to build this crucial infrastructure for the energy transition in a place with activist resistance, and where even its own consultants have said the process would take longer?
State regulators, politicians, and supporters of the Sears Island plan have a few reasons. First off, Maine Governor Janet Mills has bemoaned that to use Mack Point would require leasing the property from Sprague, which would mean a recurring cost to taxpayers. There are also size issues — the Maine Department of Transportation claims there simply wouldn’t be enough space at Mack Point for researchers and, eventually, industry to do their work.
“We know there would be environmental impacts at both the Mack Point and Sears Island sites,” Paul Merrill, director of communications for the Maine Department of Transportation, told me in an email Monday evening. “The bottom line is that the port Maine needs simply doesn’t fit at Mack Point. Sprague has a financial interest in development on Mack Point. Our goal is to develop a port that is in the best interest of the public.”
Merrill did acknowledge the new proposal for Sears Island would be located on “the same part of the island that was discussed for development in the 1990s.”
Sprague denies the logistical issues with building the port at Mack Point and told me issues Maine regulators are easily resolved. The company has begun campaigning to win key stakeholders to its side, publishing op-eds and meeting with environmental advocates. On September 12, Sierra Club’s Maine chapter hosted a virtual event with a Sprague executive, Jim Theriault, about how the port selection “needs to be considered carefully.” When I spoke to Theriault this week, he told me that Sierra Club members were asking the same question I was.
“At the end of the day, we’d be reusing an industrial site, and we’d relocate what we do to other parts of the terminal,” he said. “I’ll make myself available to anybody that wants to talk.”
And more of the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy development.
1. Cass County, Nebraska — Local permits for a 260+ megawatt NextEra solar project have been stalled for at least two months, we can exclusively report.
Battery opinion modeling in Cass County, Nebraska.Heatmap Pro Screenshot
2. Westchester County, N.Y. — Speaking of battery blues, a New York state senate race has become imbued with the politics surrounding energy storage, demonstrating how politicians are trying to take advantage of fire fears.
3. Georgetown County, S.C. — Sunrise Renewables is reportedly delaying a request for zoning approval to build two solar farms in the county amidst blossoming local opposition to development.
4. Carroll County, Maryland — Carroll County Commissioners are poised today to oppose a solar farm in the town of Sykesville before the state Public Service Commission on the grounds it conflicts with a county ban on farmland development.
5. Stark County, Ohio — The Ohio Power Siting Board last week held two days of testimony-laden hearings in its case over Stark Solar, a 150-megawatt solar farm with battery storage being developed by a subsidiary of Samsung.
Here’s what else I’m watching…