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On important court hearings, plastic pollution, and solar geoengineering
Current conditions: A city in southeastern India recorded its heaviest 24-hour rainfall in three decades when Cyclone Fengal slammed the region and left 19 dead • Storm Bora flooded the Greek island of Rhodes over the weekend • The Great Lakes and surrounding states are seeing their first major lake effect snow event of the season.
The International Court of Justice – also known as the World Court – today will start hearing from 99 countries and dozens of organizations on what legal obligations rich countries should have in fighting climate change and helping vulnerable nations recover and adapt. Crucially, the judges will also ponder potential consequences for countries’ actions (or lack thereof) that have caused climate harm. Major oil producers and greenhouse gas emitters, as well as OPEC, will also speak at the hearings. The case is the largest in the history of the top U.N. court. An advisory opinion from the World Court would not be binding, but the outcome “could serve as the basis for other legal actions, including domestic lawsuits,” The Associated Pressreported. The hearings will run for two weeks and a decision is due in 2025.
Negotiators from more than 170 countries failed to come to an agreement about how to limit the unrelenting flow of plastic pollution. The week-long U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting in South Korea was the fifth such summit so far and was to be the last, but because it ended without a deal, leaders decided to kick the can down the road and return for more talks at an undetermined later date. The tensions at this meeting weren’t that different from those hampering the COP climate talks on fossil fuel use, with major oil-producing nations blocking meaningful progress. In this case, while more than 100 countries called for a binding treaty to reduce plastic production, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others opposed this idea and instead favored a voluntary treaty aimed at improving waste management. The U.S signalled support for the idea of reducing plastic pollution but opposed mandatory production caps. Most plastics are made from fossil fuels, and the U.S. is one of the most prolific producers of plastic waste.
And speaking of U.N. summits, there’s another (yes, another!) kicking off today. The convention on combating desertification (UNCCD), taking place in Saudi Arabia, focuses on stopping land degradation – the declining health of the world’s soil and the loss of landscapes through desertification and drought. A recent study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that land degradation already affects 15 million square kilometers (about 5.7 million square miles) – an area nearly the size of Russia – and this is expanding by 1 million square miles every year. The report warned this degradation is threatening Earth’s ability to sustain life, and called for “an urgent course correction for how the world grows food and uses land.” Fixing the problem will be costly. One of the UNCCD’s lead negotiators put it at $2.6 trillion by 2030, or about $1 billion per day over the next five years, much of which will need to come from the private sector. The talks will run through December 13.
Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares abruptly stepped down yesterday. The carmaker is the fifth-largest by volume, and owns brands including Dodge, Jeep, Chrysler, Ram, and Peugeot. Sales slumped this year, particularly in North America (deliveries were down 18% in the first half of the year), and in September the company issued a profit warning on its 2024 results. Recent analysis from CNBC chalked the struggles up to stale inventory, high prices, and low vehicle quality. “The whole discussion on Stellantis has basically collapsed,” said Daniel Roeska, managing director at global investment firm Bernstein. “We’re not talking about free cash flows. We’re not talking about long-term EV strategy. … We’re only talking about how much will it cost the company to get rid of the U.S. inventory.”
In case you missed it over the long weekend: The U.S. is building an alert system that looks for signs that other nations are engaging in solar geoengineering to cool the planet, according toThe New York Times. Using high-altitude balloons, government agencies including NOAA, NASA, and the Department of Energy are monitoring atmospheric aerosols across the world in case there is a sudden increase that could indicate an effort to dim the sun. Tampering with the Earth’s atmosphere in this way could quickly bring temperatures down, but the broader effects of such an experiment on global systems is unknown, and scientists warn it could have devastating unintended consequences. The U.S. is still developing this alert system, which won’t be fully operational for years, “but is on the leading edge,” the Times said.
As early as next year, China could account for more than half of the world’s EV fleet.
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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.”