You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Geopolitics, the heightened importance of climate change, and the sheer size of the conference have transformed the event into something that it was never meant to be.
It didn’t attract a lot of attention, but for a few months, it looked like the United Nations climate process might break down.
There, process is substance: One of the most important acts every year is the selection of the next country to run the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP. This distinction normally rotates among the UN’s five regional country groups; next year, a country in the “Eastern Europe” group is due to host. All the members of a group must unanimously agree on which country will get to host.
This is a highly contingent way to decide who gets to host a climate conference. Really, the entire schema of UN regional groups represents a hangover of Cold War geopolitics that is now indefinitely unchangeable. (The “Western Europe” group is essentially the early members of NATO; it includes such notably non-western-European countries as Turkey, the United States, and — hilariously — Australia.)
The “Eastern Europe” group, meanwhile, amounts to more or less the former members of the Warsaw Pact. For obvious reasons, these countries cannot agree on a consensus choice in 2023. Russia, the group’s largest member, was not amenable to holding the COP in any eastern Europe NATO member state, such as Poland, Latvia, or Finland. The eastern European NATO members — as well as Ukraine, which is also in the UN regional group — were similarly opposed to holding the COP in Russia.
That meant that attention focused on the group’s countries in the Caucasus, at the edge of central Asia: Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Yet difficulties presented themselves here too. Azerbaijan successfully seized an Armenian exclave earlier this year, evicting up to 120,000 Armenians as part of a campaign described as ethnic cleansing. Armenia blocked any Azeri bid to host the COP.
For the first time in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s history, no country would have been able to lead COP the following year. Geopolitics had seemingly broken the consensus mechanism that makes the climate conference work.
This amounted to more than just a deficiency in party planning. It would have forced Bonn, Germany — the home of the UNFCC’s permanent headquarters — to host COP29, a kind of “break in case of emergency” default option. And it would have allowed the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate that has reportedly used the COP to make oil deals, to retain the conference presidency for at least another year.
That didn’t happen. Late last week, Armenia lifted its block of Azerbaijan’s bid, and the two countries mutually released prisoners in a gesture of good will. (Their rapprochement happened suspiciously close to President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the U.A.E.) Next year’s COP will seemingly happen in Baku, the Azeri capital.
But just because the COP process didn’t break doesn’t mean that it’s not being stretched. All is not well with the COP. During this year’s conference, a picture emerged of a COP being tested by a more rivalrous, conflict-prone world. Geopolitics, the heightened importance of climate change, and the sheer size of the conference have transformed the event into something that it was never meant to be.
This year, more than 100,000 people attended the COP. It was held at Dubai’s opulent Expo City, the Disney World-style convention campus initially built for the 2020 World Expo, the modern successor to World’s Fairs. Hundreds of nonprofit groups and companies, as well as more than 190 countries, ran public pavilions that advertised their climate accomplishments and views on decarbonization. Negotiators divided into different blocs: China and the United States, oil-producing states and small island nations, the West and the rest.
It wasn’t always like this. When the first COP was held in Berlin in 1995, the world was in a very different era, Lee Beck, the senior director for Europe and the Middle East at the Clean Air Task Force, told me. It was “the peak of multilateralism, followed by relative geopolitical stability and peace,” she said. The United States and the broader West set the agenda for global events.
“In the last two years — others would say the writing was on the wall as early as 2014 — geopolitical fragmentation really is visible,” she said. “You’re really pushing the limits of multilateralism at this one. One of the cracks is we’re unable to agree where the COP even will be.”
But geopolitics are not the only force stretching COP to the limit. Another is the sheer size of the event itself.
There used to be “big COPs” and “small COPs”: COP21, the 2015 meeting where the Paris Agreement was finalized, was a “big COP,” but the following year’s conference in Marrakech, Morocco, was a fairly minor one. Even COP21 was less than half the size of this year’s COP. And in one possible read, this year should have been a smaller COP — the biggest to-dos were formally launching the Loss and Damage fund and writing the Global Stocktake report, a kind of report card on the world’s climate progress (or lack thereof).
But small COPs don’t seem to happen any more. Since the pandemic ended and COP26 took place in Glasgow, Scotland, COPs have swollen in size, creating the age of the new “mega-COP.” More than 100,000 people attended the conference this year, making it by far the biggest COP ever. It was more than twice the size of last year’s confab in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt, which was previously the biggest COP ever. Most of those attendees had nothing to do with the negotiations ostensibly at the center of the conference — they were investors, technologists, scholars, scientists, or experts — and instead made up a de facto global trade show on climate solutions.
COP is now so big and climate is now so important that even the lack of news about the conference can generate news. When President Joe Biden declined to attend this year’s conference, The New York Times push-alerted it.
But there are possibilities that could improve the situation. One of them might be that COP simply becomes so unmanageable that it has to scale back. Few cities have the spare capacity to house an extra 100,000 visitors for 12 days. New York City, for instance, only has about 123,000 hotel rooms total. If COP were to keep growing, the problem would only get harder. When 150,000 people descended on San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual conference in 2015, the company docked a cruise ship in the bay to provide an extra thousand rooms.
There are solutions, Beck said. She noted this was the first year that every continent had held its own Climate Week: a smaller event focusing on more region-specific decarbonization challenges. This COP has also seen the emergence of country coalitions that rally around different issues or approaches. The set of countries that backed a pledge to triple renewable capacity, for instance, is different from the smaller coalition that wanted to triple nuclear capacity. These smaller, more sector-specific coalitions may have more ability to actually decarbonize and address climate change, she said.
For all these challenges, perhaps the biggest miracle is that the UNFCC process works at all, Eve Tamme, a former climate negotiator for the European Commission, told me.
“The UNFCCC process is based on consensus between almost 200 countries. Judging based on the complexity of the issue at hand and the divergence of views among the countries, it seems impossible that such a process could deliver anything at all,” she said. Even when you follow the negotiations closely, it may seem like there’s barely any movement at all, she said.
“But then again, we got the Kyoto Protocol,” she said. “And we got the Paris Agreement. So while it may look broken in the short term, somehow this dysfunctional process can still deliver.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”