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Confidence in the United Nations’ ability to find cooperative solutions to some of humanity’s biggest threats took another walloping this weekend when negotiators left the fifth and final UN plastic pollution treaty talks in Busan, South Korea, with no deal.
A planet-wide agreement on curbing plastic pollution was always going to be a big ask. Lacking the existential drama that undergirds the annual climate change conference, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for Plastics (or “the INC-5,” as this fifth round of meetings was seductively named) doesn’t exactly attract the same level of media attention as its parent group. For another thing, the connection of plastics to the cascading effects of global warming is less obvious than that of burning fossil fuels, though by no means less severe: Conventional plastics are made using newly extracted fossil fuels and, as such, are a last resort profit center for oil companies facing the expiration of their social license to operate. Plastic-related emissions are expected to outpace those of coal within the decade.
And yet despite fierce resistance from petrochemical-producing industries and nations (more on that later), a curious champion has emerged for a legally binding plastic treaty. Alongside the expected environmental heavyweights in Busan last week were several business coalitions pushing in tandem for more ambitious mandatory regulations.
There are plans to hold an “INC-5.2” next year to resolve the outstanding differences, and mounting pressure from business interests on the other side of the fight could potentially neutralize at least some of the influence of the countries that normally dominate such talks. “Businesses cannot solve the crisis alone,” Julia Cohen, the co-founder and managing director of Plastic Pollution Coalition, told me in an emailed statement. But they can “play a key role in shaping national positions, driving scalable solutions, and fostering emerging markets” alongside continued efforts to secure a global treaty.
Two main business coalitions are attempting to do just that. The first is Champions of Change, which works with the Plastic Pollution Coalition, Greenpeace, and Break Free From Plastic, and counts among its 350 signatories household brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Blueland, and Lush Cosmetics. The alliance is demanding a cap on plastic pollution, the phase-out of single-use plastics, greater reuse targets, and a justice-focused approach that centers the concerns of frontline communities. “Voluntary corporate pledges are no match for an international legally binding treaty that would require companies to move away from plastic,” Sybil Bullock, the senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace, told me in an email. “We have seen past voluntary business commitments from top polluters fail time and time again to deliver meaningful reductions in plastic pollution.”
The Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, by contrast, stops short of calling for a plastic cap, focusing instead on phasing out “avoidable plastic products” and calling for a “global criteria for circular product design.” Specifically, the group — convened by the World Wildlife Fund and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which advocates for a circular economy — is pushing for a “treaty based on strong global rules across the full lifecycle of plastics and with a comprehensive financing mechanism.” Its signatories include businesses that have historically been criticized for their reliance on plastic, including Unilever, Nestle, and PepsiCo, and its softer approach has its skeptics.
“You can only downcycle plastic and currently, how plastic is recycled, it gets contaminated by other plastics that are so toxic we cannot use them for anything that is touching or even close to touching our food,” KT Morelli, a campaign organizer for Breathe Free Detroit, which successfully campaigned to shut down a local plastic incinerator, told me. “There’s no circular answer to plastics.”
Kristen McDonald, the senior director of the plastics program at Pacific Environment, an environmental group focused on the Pacific Rim, agreed that “business actions alone — voluntary steps — have not worked so far, and so I’m very skeptical that they will work in the future.” Still, she said it’s only logical that businesses are as impatient as environmentalists when deciding on plastic regulations. If an international agreement isn’t reached, it creates a “really chaotic business environment where certain plastics are restricted in some places and not in others,” leading to trade problems and an uneven playing field at a global level as different companies face different local rules. As she added, a plastic treaty “actually stabilizes things for companies” — unless, of course, the company in question happens to be in the petrochemical industry.
Even the environmentalists working with the business groups agree that there isn’t an entirely private-sector solution to the plastic crisis. “We’re not ready to give up on the treaty process,” Erin Simon, the vice president and head of plastic waste and business at WWF, told me over email. But, she pointed out, after the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, there had been a “groundswell of support from cities, states, and other non-federal actors,” including corporations that filled in the leadership void with “commitments that would help move the needle toward reaching our global climate goals.”
And yet despite the limitations of the business coalitions, Morelli told me she thinks there is still promise in the private sector. “They have more power than the government,” she stressed, noting that “small companies and large companies can choose to refuse plastic” and push their suppliers to do the same.
This is significant because, as is the case at COP, oil-rich nations (and oil-rich lobbyists) hold outsized negotiating power at the meetings. Despite more than 100 nations favoring an agreement that would have curbed plastic production — turning off the tap at the source, as plastic-reduction advocates like to say — Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the American Chemistry Council, a trade group, pushed for a treaty last week that would have focused on plastic recycling and “mismanaged waste,” instead, an insistence that led negotiations straight into an impasse. (After flip-flopping, the United States took a noncommittal middle ground of opposing mandatory production caps but otherwise agreeing that too much plastic is probably bad.)
In the absence of a treaty and with pessimism growing around INC-5.2, business-led action might be the best shot remaining for plastic-free organizers. “Having these companies step up on their own is huge and would help us all,” Morelli said.
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The collateral damage from the Lava Ridge wind project might now include a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s.
The same movement that got Trump to kill the Lava Ridge wind farm Trump killed has appeared to derail a longstanding transmission project that’s supposed to connect sought-after areas for wind energy in Idaho to power-hungry places out West.
The Southwest Intertie Project-North, also known as SWIP-N, is a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s. If built, SWIP-N is supposed to feed power from the wind-swept plains of southern Idaho to the Southwest, while shooting electrons – at least some generated from solar power – back up north into Idaho from Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. In California, regulators have identified the line as crucial for getting cleaner wind energy into the state’s grid to meet climate goals.
But on Tuesday, SWIP-N suddenly faced a major setback: The three-person commission representing Jerome County, Idaho – directly in the path of the project – voted to revoke its special use permit, stating the company still lacked proper documentation to meet the terms and conditions of the approval. SWIP-N had the wind at its back as recently as last year, when LS Power expected it to connect to Lava Ridge and other wind farms that have been delayed by Trump’s federal permitting freeze on renewable energy. But now, the transmission line has stuttered along with this potential generation.
At a hearing Tuesday evening, county commissioners said Great Basin Transmission, a subsidiary of LS Power developing the line, would now suddenly need new input, including the blessing of the local highway district and potential feedback from the Federal Aviation Administration. Jerome County Commissioner Charles Howell explained to me Wednesday afternoon that there will still need to be formal steps remanding the permit, and the process will go back to local zoning officials. Great Basin Transmission will then at minimum need to get the sign-offs from local highway officials to satisfy his concerns, as well as those of the other commissioner who voted to rescind the permit, Ben Crouch.
The permit was many years old, and there are outstanding questions about what will happen next procedurally, including what Great Basin Transmission is actually able to do to fight this choice by the commissioners. At minimum, staff for the commission will write a formal decision explaining the reasoning and remand the permit. After that, it’ll be up to Great Basin Transmission to produce the documents that commissioners want. “Even our attorney and staff didn’t have those answers when we asked that after the vote,” Howell said, adding that he hopes the issues can be resolved. “I was on the county commission about when they decided where to site the towers, where to site the right-of-ways. That’s all been there a long time.”
This is the part where I bring up how Jerome County’s decision followed a months-long fight by aggrieved residents who opposed the SWIP-N line, including homeowners who say they didn’t know their properties were in the path of the project. There’s also a significant anti-wind undercurrent, as many who are fighting this transmission line previously fought LS Power’s Lava Ridge wind project, which was blocked by and executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office. Jerome County itself passed an ordinance in May requiring any renewable energy facility to get all federal, state, and local approvals before it would sign off on new projects.
Opposition to SWIP-N comes from a similar place as the “Stop Lava Ridge” campaign. Along with viewshed anxieties and property value impacts, SWIP-N, like Lava Ridge, would be within single-digit miles of the Minidoka National Historic Site, a former prison camp that held Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the eyes of its staunchest critics, constructing the wind farm would’ve completely damaged any impact of visiting the site by filling the surroundings of what is otherwise a serene, somber scene. Descendants of Minidoka detainees lobbied politicians at all levels to oppose Lava Ridge, a cause that was ultimately championed by Republican politicians in their fight against the project.
These same descendants of Japanese-American detainees have fought the transmission line, arguing that its construction would inevitably lead to new wind projects. “If approved, the SWIP-N line would enable LS Power and other renewable energy companies to build massive wind projects on federal land in and around Jerome County in future years,” wrote Dan Sakura, the son of a Minidoka prisoner, in a September 15 letter to the commission.
Sakura had been a leading voice in the fight against Lava Ridge. When I asked why he was weighing in on SWIP-N, he told me over text message, “The Lava Ridge wind project poisoned the well for renewable energy projects on federal land in Southern Idaho.”
LS Power did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s worth noting that efforts have already been made to avoid SWIP-N’s impacts to the Minidoka National Historic Site. In 2010, Congress required the Interior Secretary to re-do the review process for the transmission line, which at the time was proposed to go through the historic site. The route rejected by Jerome County would go around.
There is also no guarantee that wind energy will flock to southern Idaho any time soon. Yes, there’s a Trump permitting freeze, and federal wind energy tax credits are winding down. That’s almost certainly why the developers of small nuclear reactors have reportedly coveted the Lava Ridge site for future projects. But there’s also incredible hostility pent up against wind partially driven by the now-defunct LS Power project, for instance in Lincoln County, where officials now have an emergency moratorium banning wind energy while they develop a more permanent restrictive ordinance.
Howell made no bones about his own views on wind farms, telling me he prefers battery storage and nuclear power. “As I stand here in my backyard, if they put up windmills, that’s all I’m going to see for 40 miles,” he said
But Howell did confess to me that he thinks SWIP-N will ultimately be built – if the company is able to get these new sign-offs. What kind of energy flows through a transmission line cannot ultimately affect the decision on the special use permit because, he said, “there are rules.” On top of that, Idaho is going to ultimately need more power no matter what, and at the very least, the state will have to get electrons from elsewhere.
Howell’s “non-political” answer to the fate of SWIP-N, as he put it to me, is that “We live on power, so we gotta have more power.”
The week’s most important news around renewable project fights.
1. Western Nevada — The Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project may be no more.
2. Washoe County, Nevada – Elsewhere in Nevada, the Greenlink North transmission line has been delayed by at least another month.
3. Oconto County, Wisconsin – Solar farm town halls are now sometimes getting too scary for developers to show up at.
4. Apache County, Arizona – In brighter news, this county looks like it will give its first-ever conditional use permit for a large solar farm, EDF Renewables’ Juniper Spring project.
5. Putnam County, Indiana – After hearing about what happened here this week, I’m fearful for any solar developer trying to work in Indiana.
6. Tippecanoe County, Indiana – Two counties to the north of Putnam is a test case for the impacts a backlash on solar energy can have on data centers.
A conversation with Spencer Hanes of EnerVenue
Today’s conversation is with Spencer Hanes, vice president of international business development for long-duration battery firm EnerVenue and a veteran in clean energy infrastructure development. I reached out to Hanes for two reasons: One, I wanted to gab about solutions, for once, and also because he expressed an interest in discussing how data center companies are approaching the media-driven battery safety panic sweeping renewable energy development. EnerVenue doesn’t use lithium-ion batteries – it uses metal-hydrogen, which Hanes told me may have a much lower risk of thermal runaway (a.k.a. unstoppable fire).
I really appreciated our conversation because, well, it left me feeling like battery alternatives might become an easy way for folks to dodge the fire freakout permeating headlines and local government hearing rooms.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
From a developer’s perspective, if you’re working in utility-scale battery development, why ditch lithium-ion batteries?
My first battery project was at Duke Energy in 2010. It was a lead-acid battery project in Texas. It was the first time we’d incorporated batteries into a renewables project, and it was probably the biggest in the northern hemisphere. Now I don’t even think it is the biggest in Texas, but it was a big step forward.
What developers are finding is that lithium batteries don’t last as long as the developers would like them to. That means they’ve got a shelf life of 7,000 cycles, maybe 8,000 cycles, and it depends on how you use them – lithium ion batteries have to perform under the perfect environment or they can be damaged. Our batteries, on the other hand, are incredibly flexible, and we have a much more robust product that we think is safer and longer lasting than lithium – which has its place, but there are more and more safety issues around it. [There’s] virtually no risk of thermal runaway with our battery.
So I recently had a lithium-ion battery explode on me for the first time – it sparked up and fused to an electrical cable. It was very surprising, and as someone who writes about this stuff a lot, it still took me aback. As someone who is interacting with folks in data center development spaces, seeking battery storage for their operations, how are they digesting the anxieties around battery failures?
Well, the good news is that the data center developers are just trying to get electrons where they can find them. It's hard to find any sort of generation resource right now. Solar and batteries are just the easiest to find.
The safety piece is always going to be top of mind, though. They’re going to build redundancies into their battery projects, wall them off and containerize different batteries so if there’s a spark it doesn’t propagate.
Because data centers need electrons quickly right now, these companies are immune to the battery safety anxieties percolating in the public right now?
Yeah. They’ve been using them for a long time, they’re familiar with them. But the data centers and the big power users are sometimes stressing the lithium-ion batteries in ways they can no longer handle.
Do you feel like data center companies, big power users, do they get the inherent risks from a social license perspective and a siting perspective in using big lithium-ion batteries?
I think a lot of battery projects are being developed in containers because of fire issues, so if there is an issue it’s contained, and that’s a best practice right now.
What would be better is if there was a zero risk of thermal runaway. I think there’s a growing need for other technologies to come along that are safer and more utility-grade, able to serve multiple purposes. But the data center companies are very smart about how they’re developing, and they’re not going to do it in a way that creates problems for other parts of the data center.
Are there ways to avoid building out a lot of batteries? Maybe minimizing how many batteries are used on site, or how much infrastructure needs to be put on site to minimize fire risk?
I think unfortunately it's largely a case by case determination in where you are. I’m running across more and more engineering firms that aren’t comfortable with even the safest batteries being inside a building. Now, everyone wants them containerized because a thermal runaway event is a catastrophic risk no one wants to take.
EnerVenue has a product that fits that profile. There are many others that fit that profile, as well. We need many more options of technologies that can fit the bill. Lithium has a really important role in our society, doing well enough in phones and laptops, but we think we have a competitive offering for grid scale energy storage.
From your vantage point, do you see data center development as the growth area for storage in the U.S. right now?
A year ago I’d get a call once a quarter, and now I’m fielding calls every month. It's because there’s such a crunch on generation. If you put a battery with a data center … everybody wants to say the centers are operating 99.9% of the time, but they’re also not operating at 100% capacity all day, so if they can generate electricity and store it in a battery to use when rates are cheaper or when there’s a constraint on the grid, that’s a benefit to them.