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On mass coronal ejections, China tariffs, and the Panama Canal
Current conditions: Central Florida could see severe storms today • The cicadas are out in St. Louis • Kenya’s president declared today a public holiday to mourn the 238 people who have died in recent flooding.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a rare “severe geomagnetic storm watch” due to intense explosions on the sun that are spewing solar material toward Earth. This week a “large sunspot cluster” that’s about 16 times the diameter of Earth has produced at least five mass coronal ejections, huge bursts of plasma and magnetic fields that can damage satellites and disrupt electrical grids. They will start to hit Earth today and could continue to do so through the weekend. NOAA is advising operators of satellites and grids to prepare. On the plus side, the event could mean people as far south as Alabama will be able to see the Northern Lights.
NOAA
NOAA
Looking ahead to next week: On Tuesday, President Biden is expected to announce new China tariffs targeting “strategic sectors” including electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, according toBloomberg. Existing levies will remain in place. Biden wants to “contrast his approach” with that of former President Trump heading into the November election, Reutersadded. Trump has proposed sweeping tariff hikes on China that some analysts say would boost inflation. But both candidates no doubt want to be seen as tough on China, which largely dominates in global EV sales and is a major producer of cheap solar and battery tech. The Biden administration is worried “that Chinese dominance of the global market for these essential technologies would harm the U.S. economy and national security,” as Somini Sengupta explained for The New York Times.
Earlier this week, climate envoy John Podesta sat down with his Chinese counterpart Liu Zhenmin to discuss climate issues ahead of COP29 later this year. No word yet about what came out of those talks…
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And speaking of Trump, a bombshell Washington Postreport details the goings on at a Mar-a-Lago dinner where the former president rubbed shoulders with oil executives and lobbyists last month. Unnamed sources say Trump told the wealthy attendees to raise $1 billion to help him take back the White House, and in return, he promised to:
Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa told the Post that “Donald Trump is selling out working families to Big Oil for campaign checks. It’s that simple.”
Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported recently on how allies of Big Oil pumped more than $6.4 million into Trump’s joint fundraising committee in just the first three months of 2024 — on pace to surpass the $6.9 million the industry contributed in all of 2023.
Water levels are rising in the lake that supplies the Panama Canal, and authorities say they expect the passage to be back to its full operating capacity by early 2025. The canal is one of the world’s biggest shipping routes, moving some $270 billion worth of cargo every year. But a record prolonged drought in the region has reduced the number of daily crossings over the last year or so. Increased rainfall means the drought is beginning to ease, and authorities will start slowly permitting more traffic over the coming months.
As Reutersreported, U.S. liquified natural gas exporters are jostling for some of those additional slots, and the canal’s administrator Ricaurte Vasquez is exploring how to reasonably accommodate them. “They have very big aspirations in which they would like to have a canal dedicated to them,” Vasquez said, “but that is not possible, since this is a canal that should be open to every type of commerce internationally.”
The canal authorities have been exploring ways to safeguard against future droughts brought by a warming climate. One suggestion involves creating a “dry canal” that would move cargo using existing infrastructure like roadways, railways, and ports. The president-elect Jose Raul Mulino this week said he would speed up permitting for building new water reservoirs by 2030.
The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere jumped in March, marking the biggest year-over-year increase ever recorded. According to UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the global average concentration of CO2 in March was 4.7 parts per million (ppm) higher than in March last year, which is a greater leap than the previous highest increase of 4.1 ppm recorded in 2016. “We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at the institute. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.”
The unusual jump is due partly to the El Niño event and an “unusual dip” in March 2023. But the records show that the rate of growth is generally increasing as we continue to burn fossil fuels. Keeling added that a very high growth rate could continue for several more months. “This recent surge shows how far we still need to go to stabilize the climate system,” he said. “Stabilization will require that CO2 levels start to fall. Instead, CO2 is rising faster than ever.” Back in 2022, NOAA confirmed that modern CO2 concentration levels match those not seen since 4 million years ago, when “sea levels were between 5 and 25 meters higher than today, high enough to drown many of the world’s largest modern cities.”
“Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China, the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.” –Kevin Williams writing for Inside EVs about his trip to the Beijing Auto Show, where he realized just how advanced China’s EVs really are.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.