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On the last day of the climate summit, carbon removal tax credits, and Northvolt
Current conditions: A heat wave is baking southeast Australia, bringing temperatures that are 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the seasonal average • There have been 363 brush fires in New York City in November alone • It is 65 degrees and sunny in Baku for the last official day of the COP29 climate summit.
Another round of climate finance draft text was released this morning at COP29, this time with an actual number attached to it, but not a particularly big one. Developed countries are proposing to up the Collective Quantified Goal from $100 billion annually (agreed in 2009) to just $250 billion annually, far short of the $1 trillion or so economists have said will be necessary each year by 2030. Greenpeace’s delegation lead Jasper Inventor called the number “divorced from the reality of climate impacts and outrageously below the needs of developing countries.” The text does “call on” nations to “work together to enable the scaling up of financing” to at least $1.3 trillion a year from all sources, but the real number, for now, is $250 billion. Laurie van der Burg, Oil Change International’s global public finance manager, called the text “an absolute embarrassment.” Negotiations will continue. Today is the final official day in the COP29 schedule, but previous conferences have gone into overtime.
Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced a bipartisan bill yesterday that would establish tax credits for carbon removal projects. Under the Carbon Dioxide Removal Investment Act, direct air capture projects would get a $250 tax credit per metric ton of carbon removed, and indirect capture projects (through biomass, for example) would get $110. So the tax credit is technology-neutral, meaning both natural and engineered projects would be eligible. But to qualify, projects must store the carbon for 1,000 years or more. “Through technology-neutral support that doesn’t pick winners, this bill creates a level playing field that will advance innovations with the biggest climate impact while supporting new jobs and maintaining U.S. leadership in the carbon removal sector,” said Christina DeConcini, Director of Government Affairs at the World Resources Institute.
Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S., and its CEO Peter Carlsson has resigned. The company launched in 2016 and there were hopes it would help cut EV makers’ reliance on Chinese batteries. It became Europe’s best-funded startup, raising $15 billion from backers and receiving more than $50 billion in orders for its batteries. But a host of issues, “from mismanagement and overspending to poor safety standards and over-reliance on Chinese machinery,” led to its collapse, according to the Financial Times. The voluntary bankruptcy filing will protect the company from creditors while it restructures in early 2025.
U.S. prosecutors this week indicted Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, chairman of the Adani Group, as well as his nephew and six others for plotting to pay Indian government officials more than $250 million in bribes in order to secure solar energy contracts and build what would be India’s largest solar power plant project. Authorities said the bribes helped the Adanis secure more than $3 billion in loans and bonds, including from U.S. investors. And as Reutersexplained, “U.S. law bars foreign companies which raise money from U.S. investors from paying bribes overseas to win business. It is also against U.S. law to raise money from investors on the basis of false statements.” The indictment “threatens Adani’s efforts to redefine himself as a clean-power champion and secure overseas financing for projects vital to the nation’s energy transition,” Bloombergreported.
A second storm was blasting the Pacific Northwest overnight, accompanied by an atmospheric river that’s bringing a lot of moisture. The strongest winds are being felt across Washington and northern Oregon, with Northern California and southwestern Oregon receiving the most rain. Cumulative rainfall from this storm, and the bomb cyclone that hit on Tuesday, could be up to 20 inches in parts of California. High elevations could see 3 feet of snow or more. And even after this second storm passes, a third is on the way for the region over the weekend. Nearly 200,000 people in Washington state remain without power. Here is a stunning satellite image of the storm that hit earlier this week:
“When they’ve had ideas for bills or policies, they went to Democrats. They haven’t built a lot of personal relationships with members of Congress on the other side of the aisle.” –Emily Domenech, a former staffer for House Speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson who is now a senior vice president at Boundary Stone, a firm founded by veterans of the Obama Department of Energy. Domenech spoke to Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin about how clean energy companies are learning to speak Republican.
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President Donald Trump has exempted some — but certainly not all — of the critical minerals necessary for the energy transition from the sweeping tariffs he announced Wednesday. Minerals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper are key components of clean energy infrastructure such as lithium-ion batteries, which are used in electric vehicles or stationary storage, and copper wires, which conduct electricity in solar panels and wind turbines.
The White House has published a complete list of hundreds of products that are exempt from tariffs. We combed through the list looking for key transition minerals. Here are the ones that caught our eye, plus some that were notably left off. If you see anything on the list you think we missed, my inbox is open.
A renewables fight in Arizona turns ugly.
Autumn Johnson told me some days it feels like she’s shouting into a void.
Johnson is the executive director for the Arizona branch of the Solar Energy Industries Association, the nation’s pre-eminent solar power trade group. Lately, she told me, she’s seeing an increasing number of communities go after potential solar farms, many of them places with little or no previous solar development. There’s so many she’s had to start “tracking them on a spreadsheet,” she tells me, then proceeding to rattle off the names of counties and towns like battles in a war. Heatmap Pro data reveals how restricted Arizona is today, with six out of the state’s 15 counties showing a restrictive ordinance on solar and/or wind energy.
One of those battles: Chino Valley, a small town in northern Arizona. For two years, Johnson and others in the solar industry worked to try and massage the town into enacting restrictions on solar that wouldn’t all but ban the industry. But a town council meeting in mid-March turned ugly, as a debate over the restrictions ultimately devolved to heckling and hollering. “I’m surprised they didn’t throw things,” she recalled to me over the phone.
Playing back tape of that meeting, I watched as anyone who even spoke up in favor of solar was booed. When Johnson got up to speak and say SEIA recommended a smaller setback than drafted – 150 feet – audience members loudly laughed at her. Ultimately she was interrupted so many times that her time to speak expired before she finished her comments.
She asked the Chino Valley town council: “Could I finish my thought since I had to stop several times?” BOO! The audience wasn’t having it. And neither was the town council, who declined to let her continue.
After another hour-plus of testimony, the town council was swayed: Chino Valley dropped the regulation their staff spent years on and instead instructed them to draft a complete ban on all solar – as well as battery storage and wind farms.
If enacted, this regulation would all but doom Draconis, a large-scale utility solar farm proposed by bp in Chino Valley. A bp representative briefly testified at the town council meeting to say members of the public who’d previously spoken had mischaracterized the water usage required for the solar farm, but was booed off the microphone. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Johnson told me Arizonans in many pockets of the state are starting to turn on solar for two major reasons. One: There’s a partisan affiliation with renewables and climate change due to the Inflation Reduction Act and Joe Biden’s involvement in crafting the law. The other motivation? “Part of it is old school NIMBYism,” Johnson told me. “We’re acting like this is a new thing but NIMBYism is not new. Everybody wants electricity but nobody wants the infrastructure that is necessary to facilitate their use of electricity.”
She added: “The way things are moving, the number of cities and counties that have restrictions is going to be more and more.” While some communities may be accepting utility-scale development now, she is concerned they’ll hit a “saturation point where people start to build up some kind of resentment about the quantity of projects.”
“It’s domino-y,” Johnson confessed.
I’m no Arizonan. But to me, what’s happening in Arizona is essentially one big redux of an infamous prank TV segment from the show “Who Is America?” in which actor Sasha Baron Cohen plays a coastal liberal stereotype posing as an economic development entrepreneur.
Cohen’s character visits Kingman, Arizona, a town northwest of Chino Valley. In that prank, Cohen walked Kingman residents through a presentation about a promising new source of tax revenue and local employment, only to reveal… he’s talking about building a mosque in Kingman funded by the Clinton Foundation.
Kingman is in Mohave County, which happened to be the first county Johnson mentioned when we spoke. Mohave – represented in Congress by far-right Republican Paul Gosar – is one of the sunniest parts of the country, smack dab in the Mohave Desert. It’s also one of the counties with a restrictive ordinance that routinely rejects solar farms, despite a willingness among local officials to approve new fossil energy. Why? Well, in the view of some folks out there, you might as well be building a Hillary Clinton-branded mosque. Not to mention Mohave has quite a few telltale signs of being tough to develop, according to Heatmap Pro – it’s an extremely white county with an economy heavily dependent on tourism and agriculture, making land use and property value pronounced day-to-day concerns.
Stan Barnes, a lobbyist in Arizona who represents large-scale solar developers, told me that for “so long, renewable energy has been tightly embraced – even bearhugged – by the center-left side of the political spectrum.” Barnes said this fact alone has made it much harder to build in rural areas of Arizona that voted heavily for Donald Trump. “The center-right side of the political spectrum feels like it needs to resist.”
Developers are finding ways around this sticky wicket, Barnes said, but it requires being “wise” and “a certain degree of authenticity on the ground with local officials.” He noted the Palo Verde energy hub, a federally-designated energy and transmission project area in a mostly remote area that expands off of an existing power plant. Barnes also mentioned Mohave, where utility-scale solar is not banned outright but restricted to light industrial areas, as a place where development is still possible.
“There likely will not be that kind of development in Chino Valley and that’s the way it’s going to be in some jurisdictions," he said. “In other jurisdictions there’s going to be thoughtful ordinances that accommodate a variety of interests.”
And more of the week’s top renewable energy fights.
1. Long Island, New York – We begin today with a crucial stand-off for the future of energy off the coast of New York City: Rep. Chris Smith – one of the loudest anti-wind voices in Congress – is asking the Trump administration to shut down active work on the Empire Wind project.
2. Gulf of Maine – American floating offshore wind is now taking one more step backwards, as Mitsubishi pulls out of the test arrays it was working on under Biden with researchers at the University of Maine.
3. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Speaking of bad wind news, the town of Nantucket has sued to block the SouthCoast offshore wind project.
4. Washington County, Rhode Island – If you want a small piece of good news for offshore wind, the primary lawsuit against Revolution Wind’s environmental review suffered a major setback this week.
5. Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania – In another piece of good news, Scranton, Pennsylvania, approved the city’s first solar project, despite nearby residents speaking in opposition to it.
6. Carroll County, Arkansas – Less positive solar news: they’re banning solar and wind in the Ozarks.
7. Noble County, Indiana – Landowners opposed to plans for a Geenex solar farm are escalating their war on the project to a lawsuit against their board of supervisors, alleging conflicts of interest around solar decisionmaking.
8. Olmstead County, Minnesota – It seems local control won’t win the day over a Ranger Power utility-scale solar project in the Gopher State.
9. Van Zandt County, Texas – A Texas County is issuing a stop work order on a Taaleri Energia battery project alleging it is violating the local fire safety code.
10. Sacramento County, California – A D.E. Shaw Renewables utility-scale project is taking one step forward after a local planning council recommended county officials give it the green light.
11. Shasta County, California – Elsewhere in California, ecological concerns about renewables are winning out over the pace of decarbonization.
12. Ada County, Idaho – We conclude today’s hotspots with, as Jon Stewart likes to say, a ‘Moment of Zen’: the city of Boise is rejecting a challenge to battery storage development.