A Million Households Face Outages During Winter Storm

Current conditions: Winter Storm Fern buried broad swaths of the country, from Oklahoma City to Boston • Intense flooding in Zimbabwe and Mozambique have killed more than 100 people • South Australia’s heat wave is raging on, raising temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. America’s big snow storm buckles the grid, leaving 1 million without power

The United States’ aging grid infrastructure faces a test every time the weather intensifies, whether that’s heat domes, hurricanes, or snow storms. The good news is that pipeline winterization efforts that followed the deadly blackouts in 2021’s Winter Storm Uri made some progress in keeping everything running in the cold. The bad news is that nearly a million American households still lost power amid the storm. Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana were the worst hit, with hundreds of thousands of households left in the dark, according to live data on the Power Outage tracker website. Georgia and Texas followed close behind, with roughly 75,000 customers facing blackouts. Kentucky had the next-most outages, with more than 50,000 households disconnected from the grid, followed by South Carolina, West Virginia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Alabama. Given the prevalence of electric heating in the typically-warmer Southeast, the outages risked leaving the blackout region without heat. Gas wasn’t entirely reliable, however. The deep freeze in Texas halted operations at roughly 10% of the Gulf Coast’s petrochemical facilities and refineries, Bloomberg reported.

On Saturday, right before Winter Storm Fern began, the Department of Energy issued its first emergency order of the year to deploy backup generation in Texas in hopes of avoiding a repeat of Uri. As of Sunday evening, data from Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, showed natural gas providing nearly 60% of the electricity on the wires, with coal and wind neck-and-neck for second place and solar in a close fourth. It’s a relief that the grid is holding. But the overreliance on fossil fuels isn’t a good long-term strategy. While “climate change deniers love to use major winter storms as ‘proof’ that global warming isn’t real,” my colleague Jeva Lange wrote last week, “in the case of this weekend’s polar vortex, there is evidence that Arctic warming is responsible for the record cold temperature projections across the United States.”

2. New rule could speed up permits for deep-sea mining

A look at The Metals Company's proposed mining operation.The Metals Company

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration finalized a rule last week clearing the way for companies to apply for the right to mine the deep ocean floor. Under the new rules, applications for commercial and exploratory licenses are streamlined into a single process, cutting the number of required environmental assessments and public comment hearings in half. The day after the final rule came out, The Metals Company, the leading startup racing to collect mineral-rich nodules from largely unexplored depths of international waters, submitted an application to mine an area roughly twice the size of its original plans. “Nearly 50 years after this industry took shape, it’s ready to move forward,” the company told The New York Times. But opposition to deep-sea mining is mounting as environmentalists highlight the risk the industry poses to a scarcely understood and still remarkably untouched ecosystem. A corporate campaign to oppose deep sea mining just added the solar giant Sunrun to its petition, as I told you last week.

3. Tesla suspends Autopilot in new North America cars

Tesla has officially discontinued Autopilot, its basic self-driving software, in the U.S. and Canada. All new car purchases now come with standard Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Sawyer Merritt, a self-described Tesla investor with a prolific social media presence, wrote in a post on X. The move, according to TechCrunch, is designed to boost adoption of Tesla’s more advanced Full Self-Driving setting. But it’s also in response to a courtroom loss in the company’s biggest market. Last month, a judge in California ruled that Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing by overstaying the capabilities of both Autopilot and FSD for years. The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which originally brought the case, gave Tesla two months to comply with the ruling by dropping the Autopilot name.

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4. New York extends its nuclear subsidies

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is going all in on nuclear power. She started off last year at the helm of a new multi-state alliance working on building more reactors. Over the summer, she directed the state-owned power authority to oversee construction of New York’s first new reactor since the 1980s. More recently, she inked a deal with Ontario to work together on building new plants and expanded her target fivefold to 5 gigawatts of new atomic energy in the state. Now she’s backed something a little more traditional but no less important. Last week, the state’s utility regulators extended subsidies for existing nuclear plants by another two decades in hopes of keeping aging reactors open until at least 2049.

In Denmark, meanwhile, the government has officially started considering building small modular reactors and lifting the nuclear ban the parliament put into effect 40 years ago. “Green energy from solar and wind is now and will continue to be the backbone of the Danish energy supply, but we can also see that it cannot stand alone,” Lars Aagaard, Denmark’s climate, energy and utilities minister, said in a statement. “We must be open to examining whether other technologies can provide us with green energy in the future. Small modular nuclear reactors may be an option.”

5. Reactor fuel maker Standard Nuclear raises $140 million in Series A

Standard Nuclear, a startup producing TRISO atomic fuel required by several of the nation’s leading small modular reactor designs, has raised $140 million in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Decisive Point, with first-time backing from Chevron Technology Ventures, StepStone Group, and XTX Ventures. Several existing investors, including Fundomo, Andreessen Horowitz, and Crucible Capital, increased their stakes. The financing will support Standard Nuclear’s plans to expand TRISO production to over 2 metric tons per year at multiple sites across the country. The timeline, the company said, is “rapid” and will take place by mid-2026. “With this funding, we are positioned to accelerate our roadmap, scale operations, and deliver on the promise to fuel the next generation of reactors powering industry, defense, and space,” Kurt Terrani, Standard Nuclear’s chief executive, said in a statement.

While TRISO was invented decades ago, the fuel — which has extra layers of ceramic coating that are meant to make a meltdown virtually impossible — is making a comeback as the go-to material for next-generation reactors designed to reach higher temperatures by using coolants other than water. Standard Nuclear has also inked a deal with the nuclear recycling company SHINE Technologies to work on reprocessing radioactive waste into fresh fuel.

THE KICKER

Years ago, at a lecture about the spread of Lyme disease in the New York area, I learned that opossums eat thousands of ticks every season. That information totally changed my perception of a rodent that previously creeped me out. Well, it turns out kestrels — colorful, predatory birds — serve a similar function on fruit farms. New research in the Journal of Applied Ecology suggests kestrels keep harmful pathogens off fruit by eating and scaring off small birds that carry those diseases. Orchards that housed the birds in nest boxes saw fewer cherry-eating birds than orchards without, translating to what Inside Climate News described as a 81% reduction in crop damage.