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Plus: Biden's big LNG bet, Tesla's Q4 numbers, and IKEA's emissions
Current conditions: Colombia declared a natural disaster after unrelenting wildfires • Tropical Cyclone Kirrily poses a unique risk to Australia due to the storm’s “irregular shape” • Washington, D.C., could hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit in January for the first time in four years.
The Biden administration has delayed approval of 17 new facilities for the export of liquified natural gas (LNG), according to a New York Times report. Officials are instead asking the Department of Energy to widen its review of the first of these 17 — known as Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2 — to include effects on the global climate. Heatmap reached out to the White House and got a “no comment” in response. Such a decision, if confirmed, would be seen as a win for climate advocates who oppose the terminals due to their potential environmental toll: At least one analysis shows that, if all 17 export terminals were to be approved, the emissions related to the fuel that would flow through them would exceed the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the entire European Union. “Um, I think we all just won,” wrote Bill McKibben, who is perhaps the project’s staunchest foe.
Republicans would likely oppose the decision, and some already accuse President Biden of waging a war on affordable domestic energy. “What was never in question is that this would be a major campaign issue, no matter what Biden did,” wrote Heatmap’s Jillian Goodman. “It looks like he has cast his bet in favor of the climate crowd.”
Tesla reported fourth quarter results yesterday, with earnings and revenue that missed expectations. Earnings per share came in at $0.71, slightly below Wall Street’s estimates. Revenue hit $25.17 billion, which was up 3% from a year earlier, but marked the slowest growth rate in more than three years. And CEO Elon Musk tempered expectations about the year ahead, saying sales growth would be “notably lower.” He confirmed plans to start production of a next-generation "Redwood" EV – likely to be cheaper than existing models – in 2025, but indicated this wouldn’t happen until late in the year.
The update likely did little to ease investors’ concerns about the company’s footing in the shifting EV landscape: Demand for EVs is still growing but at a slower pace than before, and competition is heating up at home and abroad. China’s BYD overtook Tesla at the end of last year as the world’s top-selling EV maker. During the earnings call, Musk took the opportunity to call for trade barriers, warning that without them, Chinese rivals “will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.”
A terrifying weather video has been making the rounds this week. Perhaps you’ve seen it? Freak waves burst through the glass doors of a restaurant on a U.S. military base in the Marshall Islands, flooding the building and sweeping people away. Here’s a quick still from the video, but it’s worth watching the whole thing to get a sense of the sheer force of the water as it slams into bodies.
storyful/worldmaverick
The Marshall Islands are “at the very front lines of climate change,” reported ABC News, and one expert told the outlet that so-called extreme waves like these could become more common as sea levels rise. A separate study earlier this month found that storm waves hitting the Americas today are 80% bigger than they were 40 years ago. “Coastal towns and vessels urgently need to prepare better defenses – especially in the Americas – to avoid damage from these extreme waves," said tropical storm expert Dr. Xiangbo Feng, who co-authored the study.
In October of last year, scientists from the World Health Organization warned that cases of dengue fever would “take off” in the next decade as climate change accelerates. That timeline may have been far too conservative. Already cases of the mosquito-borne illness are rising dramatically in South America, Reutersreported. Argentina recorded more than 12,500 cases last month and stores are running out of bug spray. In Brazil, cases more than doubled in the first week of January compared to last year. Hospitals in Paraguay have set up night clinics to deal with a surge in patients. Dengue is often asymptomatic but can cause terrible joint pain in some patients and more than 35,000 people die from infections each year. “Climate change has expanded the range for mosquitoes to breed,” explained Thais dos Santos from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). A mass vaccination program is underway in Brazil.
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New Jersey approved two offshore wind projects yesterday, just three months after Orsted delivered a major blow to the state’s clean power ambitions by canceling two major contracts. The new projects would produce about 3,470 megawatts of electricity, power about 1.8 million homes, and bring $6.8 billion in economic benefits. But the clean energy would come at a cost for customers: The average residential bill would go up by about $7 per month, according to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. The operators of one of the projects promised to provide direct assistance to some low-income households to offset the increase. The wind farms are expected to start providing power to the grid by 2032.
IKEA has updated its emissions-cutting targets for 2030. The previous goal was to reduce emissions by 15% from 2016 levels. The new goal is to cut emissions in half.
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On the presidential debate, California’s wildfires, and the nuclear workforce
Current conditions: Hurricane Francine is approaching Louisiana as a Category 1 storm • The streets of Vietnam’s capital of Hanoi are flooded after Typhoon Yagi, and the death toll has reached 143 • Residents of Nigeria’s northern Borno state are urged to watch out for crocodiles and snakes that escaped from a zoo due to flooding.
Former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris squared off on the debate stage in Philadelphia last night. Here are some important climate and energy highlights from the evening:
Three large wildfires – the Line fire, the Bridge fire, and the Airport fire – are burning in Southern California, fueled by intense heat and thick, dry vegetation. Already more than 100,000 acres have been scorched. The Line fire is closing in on the popular vacation destination Big Bear, and is threatening some 65,000 structures. Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said the scale of the emergencies is straining firefighting resources, and FEMA is sending financial aid to the state. In neighboring Nevada, the Davis Fire has grown to nearly 6,000 acres and is burning toward ski resorts in Tahoe. Temperatures in the region started to cool yesterday after a long and brutal heat wave. The weather shift could help firefighters bring the blazes under control.
The White House is launching an American Climate Corps national tour this fall to highlight the work being carried out by corps members in different communities and showcase important projects. The events will feature remarks from the administration and other officials, roundtable talks with ACC members, and swearing-in ceremonies. The tour began in Maine this week with a focus on climate resilience and urban forestry, and heads to Arizona next week. The rest of the schedule is as follows, with more dates to come:
The number of students studying to become nuclear engineers is declining as demand for carbon-free nuclear energy is on the rise, according toThe Wall Street Journal. Citing data from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, the Journal reported that just 454 students in the U.S. graduated with a degree in the field in 2022, down 25% from a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the industry’s workforce is aging. “We need nuclear expertise in order to combat climate change,” said Sara Pozzi, professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan. “We are at a crucial point where we need to produce the new generation of nuclear experts so that they can work with the older generation and learn from them.” The drop in new recruits comes down to nuclear’s image problem thanks to public disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the Journal speculated.
Critical metal refining company Nth Cycle announced this week it has become the first company to produce nickel and cobalt mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) in the U.S. following the opening of its commercial-scale facility in Ohio. The company’s “Oyster” technology uses electricity to turn recyclable industrial scrap and mined ore into MHP, a key component in clean-energy technologies like batteries. “This revolutionary innovation replaces pyrometallurgy with one of the cleanest technologies in the world, and accelerates the net zero targets of the public and private sector,” the company said in a press release. It claims the Ohio unit can produce 900 metric tons of MHP per year, which would be enough to supply batteries for 22 million cell phones. The company says its process reduces emissions by 90% compared to traditional mining methods and can help EV manufacturers meet the IRA’s sourcing requirements.
A new nationwide poll of 1,000 registered U.S. voters found that 90% of respondents support President Biden’s federal clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, including 78% of respondents who said they were Trump voters.
Maybe you’ve never heard of it. Maybe you know it too well. But to a certain type of clean energy wonk, it amounts to perhaps the three most dreaded words in climate policy: the interconnection queue.
The queue is the process by which utilities decide which wind and solar farms get to hook up to the power grid in the United States. Across much of the country, it has become so badly broken and clogged that it can take more than a decade for a given project to navigate.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with two experts about how to understand — and how to fix — what is perhaps the biggest obstacle to deploying more renewables on the U.S. power grid. Tyler Norris is a doctoral student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He was formerly vice president of development at Cypress Creek Renewables, and he served on North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper’s Carbon Policy Working Group. Claire Wayner is a senior associate at RMI’s carbon-free electricity program, where she works on the clean and competitive grids team. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Can I interject and just ask why, over the past decade, the interconnection queue got much longer — but also over the past decade, 15 years, the U.S. grid did change in character and in fuel type a lot, right? We went from burning a lot of coal to a lot of natural gas. And that transition is often cited as one of the model transitions, one of the few energy transitions to happen globally that happened at the speed with which we would need to decarbonize. Obviously, switching coal to gas is not decarbonizing, but it is a model — it happened fast enough that it is a good model for what decarbonizing would look like in order to meet climate goals.
Evidently, that did not run into these kind of same interconnection queue problems. Why is that? Is that because we were swapping in within individual power plants? We were just changing the furnace from a coal furnace to a gas furnace? Is that because these were larger projects and so it didn’t back up in the queue in the same way that a lot of smaller solar or wind farms do?
Claire Wayner: I would say all the reasons you just gave are valid, yeah. The coal to gas transition involved, likely, a lot of similar geographic locations. With wind and solar, we’re seeing them wanting to build on the grid and in a lot of cases in new, rather remote locations that are going to require new types of grid upgrades that the coal to gas transition just doesn’t have.
Jesse Jenkins: Maybe it is — to use a metaphor here — it’s a little bit like traffic congestion. If you add a generator to the grid, it’s trying to ship its power through the grid, and that decision to add your power mix to the grid combines with everyone else that’s also generating and consuming power to drive traffic jams or congestion in different parts of the grid, just like your decision to hop in the car and drive to work or to go into the city for the weekend to see a show or whatever you’re doing. It’s not just your decision. It’s everyone’s combined decisions that affects travel times on the grid.
Now, the big difference between the grid and travel on roads or most other forms of networks we’re used to is that you don’t get to choose which path to go down. If you’re sending electricity to the grid, electricity flows with physics down the path of least resistance or impedance, which is the alternating current equivalent of resistance. And so it’s a lot more like rivers flowing downhill from gravity, right? You don’t get to choose which branch of the river you go down. It’s just, you know, gravity will take you. And so you adding your power flows to the grid creates complicated flows based on the physics of this mesh network that spans a continent and interacts with everyone else on the grid.
And so when you’re going from probably a few dozen large natural gas generators added that operate very similarly to the plants that they’re replacing to hundreds of gigawatts across thousands of projects scattered all over the grid with very complicated generation profiles because they’re weather-dependent renewables, it’s just a completely different challenge for the utilities.
So the process that the regional grid operators developed in the 2000s, when they were restructuring and taking over that role of regional grid operator, it’s just not fit for purpose at all for what we face today. And I want to highlight another thing you mentioned, which is the software piece of it, too. These processes, they are using software and corporate processes that were also developed 10 or 20 years ago. And we all know that software and computing techniques have gotten quite a bit better over a decade or two. And rarely have utilities and grid operators really kept pace with those capabilities.
Wayner: Can I just say, I’ve heard that in some regions, interconnection consists of still sending back and forth Excel files. To Tyler’s point earlier that we only just now are getting data on the interconnection queue nationwide and how it stands, that’s one challenge that developers are facing is a lack of data transparency and rapid processing from the transmission providers and the grid operators.
And so, to use an analogy that my colleague Sarah Toth uses a lot, which I really love: Imagine if we had a Domino’s pizza tracker for the interconnection queue, and that developers could just log on and see how their projects are doing in many, if not most regions. They don’t even have that visibility. They don’t know when their pizza is going to get delivered, or if it’s in the oven.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
In the closing minutes of the first presidential debate tonight, Donald Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris took an odd, highly specific, and highly Teutonic turn. It might not have made sense to many viewers, but it fit into the overall debate’s unusually substantive focus on energy policy.
“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” he said, addressing Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel. We’re not gonna do — things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.”
“Germany tried that and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” he continued. “We’re not ready for it.”
What is he talking about? Let’s start by stipulating that Harris has renounced her previous support for banning fracking. During the debate, she bragged that the United States has hit an all-time high for oil and gas production during her vice presidency.
But why bring Germany into it? At the risk of sane-washing the former president, Trump appears to be referencing what German politicians call the Energiewiende, or energy turnaround. Since 2010, Germany has sought to transition from its largest historic energy sources, including coal and nuclear energy, to renewables and hydropower.
The Energiewiende is often discussed inside and outside of Germany as a climate policy, and it has helped achieve global climate goals by, say, helping to push down the global price of solar panels. But as an observant reader might have already noticed, its goals are not entirely emissions-related: Its leaders have also hoped to use the Energiewiende to phase out nuclear power, which is unpopular in Germany but which does not produce carbon emissions.
The transition has accomplished some of its goals: The country says that it is on target to meet its 2030 climate targets. But it ran into trouble after Russia invaded Ukraine, because Germany obtained more than half of its natural gas, and much of its oil and coal besides, from Russia. Germany turned back on some of its nuclear plants — it has since shut them off again — and increased its coal consumption. It also began importing fossil fuels from other countries.
In order to shore up its energy supply, Germany is also planning to build 10 gigawatts of new natural gas plants by 2030, although it says that these facilities will be “hydrogen ready,” meaning that they could theoretically run on the zero-carbon fuel hydrogen. German automakers, who have lagged at building electric vehicles, have also pushed for policies that support “e-fuels,” or low-carbon liquid fuels. These fuels would — again, theoretically — allow German firms to keep building internal combustion engines.
So perhaps that’s not exactly what Trump said, to put it mildly — but it is true that to cope with the Ukraine war and the loss of nuclear power, Germany has had to fall back on fossil fuels. Of course, at the same time, more than 30% of German electricity now comes from wind and solar energy. In other words, in Germany, renewables are just another kind of “normal energy plant.”