A Big Change Is Coming to the Texas Power Grid

Current conditions: Hurricane Kirk, now a Category 4 storm, could bring life-threatening surf and rip currents to the East Coast this weekend • The New Zealand city of Dunedin is flooded after its rainiest day in more than 100 years • Parts of the U.S. may be able to see the Northern Lights this weekend after the sun released its biggest solar flare since 2017.

THE TOP FIVE

1. DOE announces $1.5 billion investment in transmission projects

The Energy Department yesterday announced $1.5 billion in investments toward four grid transmission projects. The selected projects will “enable nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity throughout Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, while creating nearly 9,000 good-paying jobs,” the DOE said in a statement. One of the projects, called Southern Spirit, will involve installing a 320-mile high-voltage direct current line across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that connects Texas’ ERCOT grid to the larger U.S. grid for the first time. This “will enhance reliability and prevent outages during extreme weather events,” the DOE said. “This is a REALLY. BIG. DEAL,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek.

The DOE also released a study examining grid demands through 2050 and concluded that the U.S. will need to double or even triple transmission capacity by 2050 compared to 2020 to meet growing electricity demand.

2. Duke Energy doubles down on fossil fuels

Duke Energy, one of the country’s largest utilities, appears to be walking back its commitment to ditch coal by 2035. In a new plan released yesterday, Duke said it would not shut down the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the U.S., Gibson Station in Indiana, in 2035 as previously planned, but would instead run it through 2038. The company plans to retrofit the plant to run on natural gas as well as coal, with similar natural-gas conversions planned for other coal plants. The company also slashed projects for expanding renewables. According toBloomberg, a Duke spokeswoman cited increasing power demand for the changes. Electricity demand has seen a recent surge in part due to a boom in data centers. Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a consumer and environmental advocacy group, noted that Duke’s modeling has Indiana customers paying 4% more each year through 2030 “as Duke continues to cling to its coal plants and wastes hundreds of millions on gasifying coal.”

3. EEI forecasts 80 million EVs on the road by 2035

The Edison Electric Institute issued its latest electric vehicle forecast, anticipating EV trends through 2035. Some key projections from the trade group’s report:

• By 2030, annual EV sales will reach 7.7 million and account for 46% of total light-duty sales.
• That will soar to 12.2 million annual sales by 2035, with EVs accounting for about 72% of total light-duty sales.
• The total number of EVs on U.S. roads in 2035 will be nearly 80 million, up from 4.5 million at the end of last year. This means that in about a decade, roughly a quarter of all the vehicles on the road – new and old – will be electric.
• All this growth will necessitate the installation of more than 42.2 million charge points by 2035, 325,000 of which will need to be public DC fast chargers.

EEI

4. Tesla issues another Cybertruck recall

Tesla issued another recall for the Cybertruck yesterday, the fifth recall for the electric pickup since its launch at the end of last year. The new recall has to do with the rearview camera, which apparently is too slow to display an image to the driver when shifting into reverse. It applies to about 27,000 trucks (which is pretty much all of them), but an over-the-air software update to fix the problem has already been released. There were no reports of injuries or accidents from the defect.

5. Study: Antarctic ‘greening’ is accelerating

A new study published in Nature found that vegetation is expanding across Antarctica’s northernmost region, known as the Antarctic Peninsula. As the planet warms, plants like mosses and lichen are growing on rocks where snow and ice used to be, resulting in “greening.” Examining satellite data, the researchers from the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire, and the British Antarctic Survey, were shocked to discover that the peninsula has seen a tenfold increase in vegetation cover since 1986. And the rate of greening has accelerated by over 30% since 2016. This greening is “creating an area suitable for more advanced plant life or invasive species to get a foothold,” co-author Olly Bartlett, a University of Hertfordshire researcher, told Inside Climate News. “These rates of change we’re seeing made us think that perhaps we’ve captured the start of a more dramatic transformation.”

Moss on Ardley Island in the Antarctic. Dan Charman/Nature

THE KICKER

Japan has a vast underground concrete tunnel system that was built to take on overflow from excess rain water and prevent Tokyo from flooding. It’s 50 meters underground, and nearly 4 miles long.

Carl Court/Getty Images