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Conditions have changed.
Donald Trump first took the office of the president in January 2017, having called climate change a Chinese-invented hoax and promising to “end the war on coal.” He quickly went to work reversing the climate policy of the previous administration, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and tossing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which restricted greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. He opened up public lands for oil and gas development and jacked up tariffs on solar panels. His budgets continually called for slashing energy research and development done by the federal government’s national laboratories.
And yet emissions fell. In 2016, U.S. annual emissions from industry and energy were 5.25 billion tonnes. In 2021, after Trump left office and in spite of all his many major policy reversals, they were 5.03 billion, more than 4% lower than when he started.
Can it happen again? Trump is returning to Washington amidst a vastly different energy, economic, and climate moment. To meet even looser versions of international climate goals (the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit set in Paris is now essentially dead) requires drastic emissions cuts, beyond the business-as-usual reductions Trump oversaw in his first four years in office. Even those passive cuts may be harder to come by this time around, however, as the dirtiest fuels now make up a smaller portion of the energy mix and electricity demand looks to grow quickly for the first time in decades.
One reason for the steady reductions during Trump’s first term was that the “war on coal” continued apace, driven as much by market forces as anything else. Buoyed by the availability of natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables and depressed by the mounting costs of maintaining aging plants and directed activism against coal investment, plants shut down by the thousands of megawatts every year of Trump’s presidency.
“You have Trump promising to bring back coal: Not only do emissions continue to decline over the course of the Trump administration, on autopilot — to some degree, coal plants close faster in the Trump administration than the Obama administration,” Alex Trembath, deputy director of the energy-focused environmental group The Breakthrough Institute, told me, though he added: “These are secular trends in the short term that the presidency does not have a lot of influence over.”
While Trump has promised to aggressively pursue more drilling and fracking for oil and gas — and nominated an oil-and-gas state governor and a fracking executive to be his Secretaries of the Interior and Energy, respectively — there has been little to no talk of coal this time around. That’s not for lack of specificity. When Trump announced Chris Wright’s nomination to be Secretary of Energy, he mentioned nuclear, solar, geothermal, oil, and gas by name. When Burgum was announced, there were references to “liquid gold” and “ALL” forms of energy.
The coal industry sees hope in the new Trump administration, but its savior from senescence may be rising demand for electricity as much as public policy.
Even as the occupant of the White House changed in 2017, one thing that did not change was the continued slow growth in electricity demand. For about the first 20 years of this century, electricity load growth averaged about half a percent a year, including from 2017 to 2021. This made coal-to-gas switching easier to pull off.
“There was effectively no load growth — not just in those four years, from effectively 2008 to 2022,” Dennis Wamstad, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me.
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions stopped meaningfully rising in the early part of this century and finally peaked in 2009, according to Global Carbon Budget and Our World In Data, thanks to slow load growth, the recession, and the ascendance of natural gas in electricity generation. With next-to-no demand growth, utilities and energy companies could afford to retire their least efficient plants — and indeed, “declines in coal generation appear to be the largest driver of power sector emissions reductions” during the first Trump term, John Bistline, an energy analyst at the Electric Power Research Institute, told me in an email.
Since 2020 when electricity use dipped due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a combination of economic growth, electrification of home heating and transportation, new factories, and data centers have boosted five-year energy demand growth projections from 2.6% to 4.7%, a figure that the energy policy consulting firm Grid Strategies says may still be an underestimate.
This has meant some stalling on emissions reductions from burning fossil fuels. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has projected that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will flatten out in this year and next “because of small, counteracting changes in emissions from coal, natural gas, and petroleum products.” The EIA has also projected a slowdown in coal plant retirements, with this year on pace for the fewest since 2011. Several utilities and electricity markets have pushed out retirement dates to maintain reliability on the grid in the face of sudden demand spikes, including those in Georgia, Maryland, and possibly Indiana.
The chief financial officer of Duke Energy, which owns utilities in the Southeast and Midwest, told Bloomberg that the company’s plans to convert coal plants to co-fire with natural gas could be scrapped or delayed based on the new Trump administration’s plans for the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant emissions rules. “The pace of the energy transition could change,” he told Bloomberg.
Large coal retirements are still forecast for the rest of the decade, but planned shutdowns have shrunk from 34.2 gigawatts of coal capacity retired over the next three years to 30 gigawatts, a greater than 12% reduction, according to data from S&P Global Commodities Insights.
“American citizens cast their votes for change, a change for the working class, a change that will improve the economy, a change for thoughtful approaches to our energy future,” Emily Arthun, the chief executive officer of the American Coal Council, told me in an e-mailed statement. “Coal is a critical resource needed for the well-being of our economy and the well-being of our citizens.”
Wamstad, the energy analyst, argues that this slowdown is just that: a slowdown, and that the economic case against coal is still overwhelming. “We actually think that structural change is going to continue in the 2020s, regardless of demand growth,” Wamstad told me. “Our findings are more aggressive than EIA or S&P. We expect by end of decade we will have retired another 100,000 megawatts of coal capacity, and by 2030 or 2031 we’ll have retired two-thirds of all capacity.”
Trembath was a little more circumspect about the ability of renewables to meet the lost capacity from shut-down coal, especially if Trump takes an ax to the Inflation Reduction Act and permitting difficulties persist, especially for wind.
“There are quite a few bottlenecks on current trends that will make sustained decarbonization more difficult than it was [from] 2017 to 2021,” Trembath told me. Load growth will put pressure on renewables and other non-carbon sources to keep up, while natural gas turbine providers
are seeing orders double. “You have big announcements about small and advanced nuclear reactors, but a lot has to happen for new steel in the ground or Three Mile Island to reopen,” he said, referring to the splashy announcement Microsoft and Constellation made about restarting the 835-megawatt facility. “I think the most likely thing to meet a bunch of that load growth is natural gas.”
Even that may be a glass-half-full perspective, however.
“We have gas that is cheaper and we have renewables that are clearly cheaper and available now,” Wamstad said. Even if coal plants are kept open for another few years due to higher demand, “that’s a bad thing,” Wamstad said. “That doesn’t really change the direction we’re going — it changes the end date.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct the time horizon for Grid Strategies’ load growth projections
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”