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Climate

AM Briefing: 'Bigger Than the Hoover Dam'

On a major clean energy infrastructure project, mapping ocean activity, and liquid hot magma

AM Briefing: 'Bigger Than the Hoover Dam'
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: The western U.S. is in the midst of a severe “snow drought” • The Great Lakes began 2024 with their smallest amount of ice cover in 50 years • Finland’s Enontekiö airport recorded the country’s coldest January temperature since 2006: -44 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Offshore wind sees a turbulent start to 2024

“The rollercoaster that is the U.S. offshore wind industry is already racing in 2024,” says Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci. Indeed, after missing an end-of-year deadline to start sending energy to the U.S. grid, the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm came online at 11:52 p.m. on Tuesday, delivering five megawatts of power to the New England grid. The Vineyard Wind 1 project, located near Martha’s Vineyard, will eventually consist of 62 turbines capable of powering 400,000 homes in Massachusetts.

“The arrival of Vineyard Wind is a welcome tonic to a nascent offshore wind industry that has struggled in the US in recent months,” writes Oliver Milman at The Guardian. But on Wednesday, BP and Equinor abandoned a contract to sell offshore wind energy to the state of New York, citing the familiar headwinds of rising costs, interest rates, and supply chain problems. Last October the companies tried to negotiate with the state for higher rates for selling renewable energy credits. Their request was turned down, only for the state to open the floor to new project proposals, including from BP and Equinor. “The agreement is the latest evidence of the malaise engulfing the fledgling offshore US wind industry,” writes Myles McCormick at the Financial Times, “but also illustrates the willingness of state authorities to provide flexibility to prevent projects from being abandoned.”

2. Construction goes ahead on SunZia clean energy transmission line

Some important renewable energy news went under the radar this week: Pattern Energy’s SunZia Transmission line secured $11 billion in financing, which means construction can continue on the “largest clean energy infrastructure project in U.S. history.” The 550-mile high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line will run between central New Mexico and south-central Arizona, delivering power to western states from the SunZia Wind facility being built in New Mexico. “The size and scale of both the SunZia project and this multifaceted financing show that the renewable energy space can secure attractive capital at levels previously only seen in traditional generation,” says Daniel Elkort, executive vice president at Pattern Energy.

Upgrading transmission systems will be key to meeting the Biden administration’s goal of eliminating carbon emissions from the power sector by 2035: By one estimate, transmission systems will need to expand by 60% by 2030. The SunZia Transmission line will be able to move 3,000 megawatts of wind power to 3 million people and has been called “bigger than the Hoover Dam.” But its progress has been rocky: Indigenous groups have expressed concerns about the line’s impact on religious and cultural sites, and environmentalists worried it could harm wildlife habitat.

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  • 3. New maps show hidden extent of industrial activity at sea

    Incredible new maps published in the journal Nature expose the great extent to which human activity has pervaded the world’s oceans. For the project, researchers led by Google-backed nonprofit Global Fishing Watch used artificial intelligence to analyze huge amounts of offshore data from satellite imagery. They found that many industrial vessels aren’t publicly tracked, exposing a potential blindspot for conservation efforts. The data also showed that offshore wind turbines now outnumber oil structures:

    Nature

    Nature

    4. GOP climate advocate John Curtis launches Senate bid

    Utah Rep. John Curtis announced this week he is running for the Senate seat left vacant by retiring Sen. Mitt Romney. The primary field is likely to be crowded, but Curtis’s entry is interesting because he is “one of the GOP’s leading voices on fighting climate change,” says E&E News. He launched and chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus, has supported some of the Biden administration’s policies on solar, and attended COP28 to push for permitting reform. But it will be interesting to see whether climate change features prominently in his campaign: Curtis didn’t mention environmental issues in his first campaign video but pledged to “work to make America not just energy independent, but energy dominant.”

    5. Researchers hope volcanic magma could provide ‘quantum leap’ in geothermal energy

    Researchers in Iceland have plans to drill into a magma chamber beneath a volcano in an attempt to better understand the hot molten rock and eventually even “make a quantum leap in geothermal energy production,” reports New Scientist. The Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) project will start drilling in 2026, focusing on a volcano called Krafla in north-east Iceland. The researchers hope to develop near-magma geothermal energy technology that would allow wells to trap hot, pressurized water to drive turbines and produce cheap, clean electricity. “There are endless opportunities,” says Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson at the Geothermal Research Cluster (GEORG) in Reykjavík. “The only thing we need to do is to learn how to tame this monster.”

    THE KICKER

    A company called Moolec Science has been inserting pig genes into soy plants to produce beans that are pink and taste meaty.

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    AM Briefing

    Trump’s Reactor Realism

    On the solar siege, New York’s climate law, and radioactive data center

    A nuclear reactor.
    Heatmap Illustration/Georgia Power

    Current conditions: A rain storm set to dump 2 inches of rain across Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas will quench drought-parched woodlands, tempering mounting wildfire risk • The soil on New Zealand’s North Island is facing what the national forecast called a “significant moisture deficit” after a prolonged drought • Temperatures in Odessa, Texas, are as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than average.

    THE TOP FIVE

    1. Trump’s plan to build 10 new large reactors is making headway

    For all its willingness to share in the hype around as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors and microreactors, the Trump administration has long endorsed what I like to call reactor realism. By that, I mean it embraces the need to keep building more of the same kind of large-scale pressurized water reactors we know how to construct and operate while supporting the development and deployment of new technologies. In his flurry of executive orders on nuclear power last May, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Energy to “prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate” 5 gigawatts of power uprates to existing reactors “and have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.” The record $26 billion loan the agency’s in-house lender — the Loan Programs Office, recently renamed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing — gave to Southern Company this week to cover uprates will fulfill the first part of the order. Now the second part is getting real. In a scoop on Thursday, Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported that the Energy Department has started taking meetings with utilities and developers of what he said “would almost certainly be AP1000s, a third-generation reactor produced by Westinghouse capable of producing up to 1.1 gigawatts of electricity per unit.”

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    Green
    Podcast

    The Peril of Talking About Electricity Affordability

    Rob sits down with Jane Flegal, an expert on all things emissions policy, to dissect the new electricity price agenda.

    Power lines.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    As electricity affordability has risen in the public consciousness, so too has it gone up the priority list for climate groups — although many of their proposals are merely repackaged talking points from past political cycles. But are there risks of talking about affordability so much, and could it distract us from the real issues with the power system?

    Rob is joined by Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute and the States Forum. Flegal was the former senior director for industrial emissions at the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, and she has worked on climate policy at Stripe. She was recently executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation.

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    Power lines.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    This transcript has been automatically generated.

    Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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