A New Climate Finance Goal Remains Elusive at COP29

Current conditions: A severe heat wave warning has been issued for most of Australia • Schools are closed across parts of Great Britain due to snow and ice from Storm Bert • The atmospheric river pummeling Northern California will reach peak intensity today.

THE TOP FIVE

1. New COP29 climate finance text is light on critical details

A new draft text for climate finance was released in the early hours at COP29 today. While the document has been significantly cut down from 25 pages to 10, it contains little of substance. The most important detail – how much money developed countries will contribute annually to helping developing countries adapt to climate change – remains undecided, and placeholders have been added to the text where a dollar amount should be: “[X] trillion of dollars annually” and “[X] billion per year.” Negotiators are dismayed. “We came here to talk about money,” Mohamed Adow, director of the thinktank Power Shift Africa, told The Associated Press. “The way you measure money is with numbers. We need a check, but all we have right now is a blank piece of paper.”

2. Study: Climate change is boosting hurricane wind speeds

Ocean heat due to human-caused climate change is making Atlantic hurricane winds stronger, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Research: Climate. Between 2019 and 2023, maximum hurricane wind speeds increased by 18 mph on average. In most cases, the increase was enough to bump a storm into a higher category and bring about more destruction. Eight storms saw wind speeds jump by 25 mph or more; three intensified by two storm categories as a result. So far in 2024, all of the 11 named storms have been made stronger because of climate change. Hurricane Milton’s wind speeds were 24 mph stronger. “We had two Category 5 storms here in 2024,” said Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist at Climate Central and lead author on the study. “Our analysis shows that we would have had zero Category 5 storms without human-caused climate change.”

3. Nuclear regulators greenlight Kairos’ demonstration plant

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted Kairos Power permission to build its first electricity-producing plant, the Hermes 2 Demonstration Plant, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Kairos’ high-temperature nuclear reactors are cooled by fluoride salt, rather than water. The company began construction on its first demonstration reactor back in July, and the new plant will “build on learnings” from that project. In a news release, Kairos said the project was reviewed and approved in just over one year.

Kairos’ reactor technology uses a fluoride salt coolant.Kairos Power

“The Commission’s approval of the Hermes 2 construction permits marks an important step toward delivering clean electricity from advanced reactors to support decarbonization,” said Mike Laufer, Kairos CEO and co-founder. “We are proud to lead the industry in advanced reactor licensing and look forward to continued collaboration with the NRC as we chart a path forward with future applications.” Kairos signed an agreement with Google in October to deploy small modular reactors that will provide 500 megawatts of power to the tech company’s data centers by 2035.

4. ExxonMobil to supply lithium to large EV battery plant

In case you missed it: ExxonMobil signed a deal this week to supply 100,000 tons of lithium from its Arkansas extraction project to LG Chem’s large EV battery plant in Tennessee. The partnership “could strengthen the U.S. critical mineral supply chain and be a game-changer for EV manufacturers,” Electrek reported. Once completed, LG Chem’s plant is expected to be the largest of its kind in the U.S., producing 60,000 tons of cathode material annually. The move by ExxonMobil is “part of a broader effort among U.S. oil companies to diversify their oil- and gas-focused portfolios,” as E&E News explained.

5. Georgia releases eye-popping new energy demand estimates

Georgia Power recently disclosed that its projected load growth for the next decade from “economic development projects” has gone up by over 12,000 megawatts, to 36,500 megawatts. Just for 2028 to 2029, the pipeline has more than tripled, from 6,000 megawatts to 19,990 megawatts, destined for so-called “large load” projects like new data centers and factories. To give you an idea of just how much power Georgia businesses will demand over the next decade, the two new recently booted up nuclear reactors at Vogtle each have a capacity of around 1,000 megawatts. Of the listed projects that may come online, five will require 1,000 megawatts or more. “The culprit is largely data centers,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin. “About 3,330 megawatts’ worth of data centers have broken ground in Georgia, and just over 4,100 megawatts are pending construction, vastly outstripping commitments made by industrial customers.”

THE KICKER

Indonesia, the fifth largest generator of coal power in the world, plans to retire its coal power plants within the next 15 years to curb climate change, the nation’s President Prabowo Subianto said at the G20 summit in Brazil.