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On holding Big Oil to account, SAF subsidies, and Tornado Alley
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are slamming Houston • Earth could experience another solar storm this weekend • It’s about 78 degrees Fahrenheit and partly cloudy in New York City, where former President Donald Trump has been found guilty on 34 felony counts.
Vermont has become the first state to pass a law holding big fossil fuel companies financially responsible for climate change damages caused by the emissions from their products. The state’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, neither signed nor vetoed bill S.259, aka the “Climate Superfund Act,” therefore allowing it to become law. In a rather terse note to Senate Secretary John Bloomer about the move, Scott warned of a lack of state funds to take on Big Oil, but said he understands “the desire to seek funding to mitigate the effects of climate change that has hurt our state.”
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo previously reported, the bill will kick off a multiyear process that, in the most optimistic case, could bring money into the state by 2028. The first step is for the state Treasurer to assess the cost to Vermont, specifically, of emissions from the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels from 1995 to 2024, globally. Regulators will then request compensation from responsible parties in proportion to the emissions each company contributed. The state will identify responsible parties by focusing only on the biggest emitters, companies whose products generated at least a billion tons of emissions during that time. The money will go toward implementing a state “resilience and implementation strategy” to be mapped out in the next two years.
New analysis from Reuters suggests almost no U.S. ethanol will be eligible for President Biden’s sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) subsidies, because very few corn farmers currently use all three of the “climate smart agriculture” practices outlined by the Treasury Department and IRS. The administration’s guidance, finalized at the end of April, said that SAF refiners would be eligible for a credit of $1.25 per gallon if their fuel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 50% compared to traditional jet fuel, and up to $1.75 per gallon if emissions cuts go beyond 50%. But corn producers will only be eligible if they use cover cropping, avoid tilling, and use efficient fertilizer application to keep carbon in the soil. “I have not had a single ethanol producer member contact me and say, we’re going to meet the climate-smart agriculture requirements,” Brian Jennings, CEO of the lobby group American Coalition for Ethanol, told Reuters. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said the rule will encourage farmers to adopt these practices. Biden once said that farmers would provide 95% of SAF.
Last night Jeep officially introduced its first North American electric vehicle, the Wagoneer S. The 600-horsepower vehicle has over 300 miles of range, can go from 0 to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds, and can charge from 20% to 80% in 23 minutes using a DC fast charger. The vehicle will “test the appetite of Jeep customers for a fully electric model,” wrote Peter Valdes-Dapena at CNN. The Wagoneer S will cost about $72,000 and go on sale in the U.S. and Canada this fall, before hitting markets worldwide. Take a look:
Jeep/Stellantis
Jeep/Stellantis
At least 29 people have reportedly died in India due to the extreme heat wave baking the country. Local media outlets said 10 people died of heat stroke in the eastern state of Odisha and 19 were killed in Bihar. One weather station in the capital New Delhi recorded 127.22 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday. That reading may have been faulty, officials said, but the mercury will hover around 110 degrees for at least another week and electricity demand is soaring as people crank up their air conditioners. Making matters worse, the city is experiencing a water shortage, with reports of desperate residents chasing after water tankers. A heat wave has gripped much of South Asia since April, and researchers say human-caused climate change is making the heat wave about 30 times more likely.
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A new analysis of research recently published by the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology finds that between 1951 and 2020, tornadoes have trended both eastward and “away from the warm season, especially the summer, and toward the cold season.” This means more tornadoes are forming outside Tornado Alley and in densely populated southeastern and midwestern states. “We truly aren’t in Kansas anymore,” quipped Heatmap’s Jeva Lange. The analysis indicates that, between 1951 and 2020, the frequency of winter tornadoes has increased by a staggering 102%. This shift could potentially increase the destruction and disruption of tornadoes that catch people off guard over the holidays or simply unawares. The authors offered a bit of real estate advice: avoid Jackson, Mississippi, which saw one of the greatest increases in tornadoes of any city in the United States, and exhale if you’ve recently purchased property in Cleburne, Texas, which saw one of the greatest decreases.
A large new study published in the journal Science finds that existing oil and gas projects are sufficient to meet global energy demand through 2050, and urges governments to stop issuing permits for new fossil fuel exploration.
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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.