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New England had to burn oil when hydropower was briefly cut off up north.
The Quebec forest fires that have recently contributed to some of the worst smoke days in American history are also wreaking minor havoc on the electric grid.
Observers of electricity markets were puzzled Wednesday evening when grid operator ISO-New England announced that “due to an unanticipated transmission outage and higher-than-forecast consumer demand,” the New England grid would be calling on reserves “to balance the regional power system.” Demand that day did not seem particularly or unexpectedly high, nor were there any obvious supply issues in New England, so why was ISO-NE having trouble? More illumination came Thursday, when it specified there was a transmission issue with its imported power.
A spokesperson for Hydro-Québec, the French Canadian utility, told me that its Phase-2 power line, which connects the vast amounts of hydropower generated in northeastern Canada to a substation over 900 miles away in Boston, went down briefly yesterday due to forest fires in the James Bay region. “Heat and smoke can trigger automated system protection mechanisms, which will essentially shut down the powerline in order to protect it,” the spokesperson said. These are many of the same fires that have recently blanketed the eastern and midwestern United States in smoke.
Imported hydropower from Quebec plays a crucial role in New England’s grid, responsible for over 11% of the region’s total electric use in 2022. New York is also looking to expand its use of imported hydropower, with a new transmission line that will run from the Canadian border to New York City and is currently under construction.
Quebec itself essentially powers its entire grid with its massive hydropower resources, making it one of the least carbon intensive grids in the industrialized world.
Some of that excess hydropower has been exported to New England for decades, and it has become more and more attractive south of the border as New England and New York seek to decarbonize.
The actual scale of the disruption in power delivery turned out to be well within ISO-NE’s capabilities to manage. The grid operator didn’t ask consumers to use less power, as Texas did in the past few weeks when its grid was beset by high temperatures and record consumer demand, or as New York and California have done on hot days. But in addition to pulling in more imports from New York state, ISO-NE also had to burn oil for electricity, which New England sometimes does when its natural gas supply runs short, especially in the winter when gas is used for heat.
While the system in both Quebec and New England survived the transmission hiccup — a Hydro-Québec spokesperson made sure to note that “our bulk transmission infrastructure has not suffered any damage as a result of the forest fires” — it does underscore the threat that even non-carbon-emitting electricity generation faces from the effects of climate change. In addition to briefly shutting off this transmission line, forest fires have also reduced solar generation due to blocking out the sun.
On the other hand, as Joe LaRusso of the Acadia Center, a New England clean energy group, pointed out to me, transmission is also what saved the day when Quebec’s imports were shut off, as imports from New York picked up the slack. “It serves as a demonstration not that transmission is a weak link, but that it’s the principle means of enabling balancing authorities like ISO-NE and NYISO to rely on one another to make up for variations in capacity.” That’s as true of “unplanned generator and transmission outages” as was the case in Quebec, as it is for more predictable fluctuations in solar and wind power.
“While forest fires are not a new phenomenon, the intensity and increased frequency of these events in North America are the result of climate change,” the Hydro-Québec spokesperson said. “The amplitude of this event should serve as a clear reminder that we need to accelerate every effort towards transitioning away from the burning of fossil fuels for electricity generation.”
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On the new Transportation secretary, California’s fires, and energy storage
Current conditions: Storm Herminia moved over Europe, bringing severe flooding to Spain and France • The air quality is low in Mumbai, where a panel is considering banning vehicles powered by gas or diesel • It’s chilly but sunny in Washington, D.C., where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face the Senate Finance Committee in his confirmation hearings to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
A lot happened in Washington yesterday. Chaos erupted after the Office of Management and Budget dropped a two-page memo ordering a pause on federal grant programs that “advance[s] Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” According to Heatmap’s Jael Holzman, the freeze targets programs including vast swathes of the federal government most relevant to the energy sector, from major Energy Department cleantech research offices and labs to all implementations of energy tax credits, including those in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also includes essentially all work at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a Commerce Department subagency that produces climate science and weather forecasting. The order was set to take effect at 5 p.m. but a federal judge temporarily halted enforcement of it until a hearing on February 3.
Also yesterday, Sean Duffy was confirmed by the Senate as the new Transportation secretary. He wasted no time, signing an order to roll back former President Biden’s fuel economy standards aimed at reducing emissions. His memo said the standards “put coercive pressure on automakers to phase out production of various models of popular (internal combustion engine) vehicles.”
Human-caused climate change increased the likelihood of California’s wildfires by 35%, according to a rapid analysis from the World Weather Attribution. Warmer weather, drier conditions, and a longer fire season all supercharged the fires, the group said, making them not only more likely, but 6% more intense. It also found that the state’s dry season has gotten about 23 days longer, and the likelihood of no rainfall in the last three months of the year has doubled since pre-industrial years. “What makes [these fires] ever more dangerous, and what is something that the government of California alone can definitely not do anything about is human-induced climate change,” said WWA co-lead scientist Friederike Otto. “And drill, baby, drill will make this much, much worse.” The study hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.
General Motors reported solid Q4 earnings for 2024 yesterday that beat expectations, but it’s the year ahead that investors are worried about. The automaker’s shares fell after the earnings call because analysts don’t think the company is prepared for potential policy changes under President Trump. “In our view, the guidance for 2025 leaves no room for errors, and also does not include impact from regulatory changes in the U.S., especially on tariffs and BEV support,” analysts at Bernstein said in a note. GM CEO Mary Barra said the company’s EV business was moving toward profitability. The Chevy Equinox EV saw an 85% quarterly increase in sales, and the GMC Hummer EV had its “best sales quarter ever.” Tesla will report its Q4 financial results this evening.
In other EV news, Volkswagen has reportedly canceled the U.S. rollout of the ID.7 electric sedan. We might have seen this coming. The company delayed the original rollout, which was slated for last May. Now, a company spokesperson toldAutomotive News the “ongoing challenging EV climate” in the U.S. was the reason for the decision to pull the plug.
The large trade group that calls itself “the voice of the solar industry” is calling for a major ramping up of U.S. energy storage by 2030. The Solar Energy Industries Association wants to see 10 million storage installations deployed by 2030 so the country can reach a total of 700 gigawatt-hours of installed storage capacity across the grid. For context, current installed storage capacity is an estimated 83 GWh, and there are about 500,000 storage installations. Current projections suggest the U.S. will have 450 GWh of storage capacity by 2030. The group calls on states, regional transmission organizations, and the federal government to speed things up, and offers some suggestions for how they might do that:
SEIA
Raised levels of heavy metals have been detected in the soil surrounding the Moss Landing Power Plant in California’s Monterey County, where a massive battery fire burned for five days earlier this month. KQED reported that scientists at San José State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories found “a hundreds-fold rise” in toxic metals including nickel, manganese, and cobalt in the topsoil within a two mile radius of the plant. The findings contradict those of the Environmental Protection Agency, which said its air monitoring didn’t find any evidence of harmful toxins released from the fire. Residents near the plant have reported health problems like headaches, nosebleeds, and nausea in the weeks after the blaze. The metals detected are linked to long-term health problems including lung disease, cancer, and Parkinson’s disease.
The Doomsday Clock was updated yesterday. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board moved it from 90 seconds to midnight to 89 seconds to midnight, “the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its 78-year history.”
Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
Among the many, many, many actions President Donald Trump took in his first week to curtail clean energy and climate policy in the U.S., he issued an order freezing all wind farm approvals. It’s anyone’s guess what happens next. On the one hand, we know the president hates wind energy — as he reiterated during his first post-inauguration interview on Fox News last week: “We don’t want windmills in this country.” But the posture is also at odds with Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency and vision for “energy dominance.” Plus, it’s Trump. There’s a non-zero chance he’ll change his mind.
But let’s assume the wind leasing and permitting freeze stays in place for the next four years. Trump also plans to “conduct a comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending” existing leases, which could upheave projects already under construction or built. How do we make sense of what this all means for climate change?
First let’s look at what’s in the pipeline: If the pause on new leases and permits for offshore wind remains in place for the next four years, but all pre-approved projects get built, the U.S. could have about 13 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
Three operating offshore wind projects currently send 174 megawatts of power to the U.S. grid. There are four projects under construction up and down the Atlantic, which are expected to generate about 5,021 megawatts once completed. Seven additional projects have all of their federal permits, and if built, could generate 7,730 megawatts. That’s a bigger “if” for some than others — three of the projects have not yet found anyone to buy their power.
13 gigawatts falls far short of a goal that the Biden administration set at the beginning of his presidency to deploy 30 gigawatts by 2030. But it was already becoming clear that the U.S. was going to miss that target. Last summer, the American Clean Power Association, which represents the offshore wind industry, projected that we were on track for about 14 gigawatts by that year, with 30 gigawatts achievable by 2033 and 40 gigawatts by 2035.
Cutting emissions sooner is, of course, better than later, but this doesn’t necessarily veer us off course for the longer-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, either. One of the most comprehensive looks at how to decarbonize the grid is Princeton University’s Net Zero America report from 2021 (co-led by Jesse Jenkins, a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast). The study models the economic development of carbon-free energy systems under a number of different scenarios in which energy demand grows more or less, and where renewable development is more or less constrained. Across all of them, offshore wind makes up less than 1% of the power system by 2030, with between 5 and 10 gigawatts deployed — numbers that may still be achievable. It then grows to between 1% and 7% of the system in 2050, with anywhere from 30 to 460 gigawatts deployed.
While the national picture looks okay, it’s a much bigger deal regionally. For population centers on the East Coast, which don’t have enough available land to build the onshore wind or solar resources necessary to decarbonize, offshore wind is a linchpin. When modelers try to decarbonize states like New York or New Jersey without offshore wind, they end up with lots of transmission capacity to deliver clean power from wind and solar farms all the way in the Midwest — a prospect that’s no less, and potentially much more politically fraught than offshore wind development. Unless other clean energy sources like nuclear or geothermal power become cheap and abundant, there’s no clear alternative path for a place like New York City to get to zero emissions.
State goals also become nearly impossible if no additional projects are able to get through the permitting process until at least 2029. New York State, for example, plans to deploy 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035 so that it can achieve a carbon-free grid by 2040. It currently has just 1.8 gigawatts in the pipeline, with the potential for another 1.2 if Empire Wind 2 bids into the state’s next solicitation. Maryland’s goal is 8.5 gigawatts by 2031. It has just 1 gigawatt on the way. Massachusetts aims to procure 5.6 gigawatts by 2027. It has contracts for 3.4 gigawatts, but less than half are fully permitted.
Yet another way to think about the emissions consequences of this permitting pause is in terms of opportunity cost — the projects that will be delayed, assuming it lasts four years, and the lease areas that will go unsold.
The Biden administration held several offshore wind lease sales, and currently executed leases have the potential to generate more than 36 gigawatts, according to project development documents filed with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and federal estimates. But the projects planned for these lease areas are in various stages of development, and some of them, like plans for floating offshore turbines in California and Maine, have many technological hurdles to solve. A four-year pause will affect those far less than the 16 gigawatts’ worth of projects that have already started the federal permitting process.
The unsold areas represent a much bigger loss. The clean energy think tank Energy Innovation found that the U.S. has potential to build more than 1,000 gigawatts of “highly productive” offshore wind projects, meaning the wind is strong and constant enough to keep the turbines spinning more than half the time. We’ve leased less than 1% of that.
But by another measure, the opportunity cost for offshore wind might not be significant considering the trajectory we’ve been on. Every year the Rhodium Group, a clean energy research firm, models expected future technology deployment and its emissions implications based on existing policies and market conditions. The group’s 2024 report found that wind energy as a whole would reach 20% to 25% of U.S. electricity generation by 2035. Those estimates include just 9 gigawatts to 12 gigawatts of offshore wind, with the vast majority from onshore installations.
That brings us to the implications of pausing onshore wind development, which are arguably worse.
To date, the U.S. has installed about 152 gigawatts’ worth of land-based wind farms. Under the Net Zero America scenarios, that number should more than double by 2030. But deployment has slowed in recent years. The U.S. added just 6.4 gigawatts to the grid in 2023, down from 14.2 in 2020. While the 2024 totals haven’t been published, we were on track to add 7.1 gigawatts last year. We’d have to add more than three times that every year, starting this year, to meet the Net Zero America study’s 2030 projections.
Onshore wind deployment has been held back, in part, by transmission constraints. If the new administration clears hurdles to building more power lines, it could help speed things up. Also, since many onshore wind projects are built on private land, Trump’s order won’t have the same sweeping effect that it will offshore. But as my colleague Jael Holzman reported, the impact could still be far-reaching. More than half of all wind projects under development may be affected by the pause, as many are so tall that they need approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration. Energy-hungry projects like data centers may end up turning to natural gas, instead.
Trump’s executive order labels the pause of leasing and permitting as “temporary,” so all of this is still hypothetical. Perhaps a bigger existential threat to the industry would be if Congress decided to cut the tax credits for wind energy or wind them down earlier than currently planned to pay for the continuation of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, many of which expire this year. But since the tax credits are now pooled together with other energy sources that Republicans support, like nuclear and geothermal, under "technology neutral” credits, that would be a lot harder to do.
Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman talk Canadian tariffs with Rory Johnston.
On February 1 — that is, three days from now — President Donald Trump has promised to apply a tariff of 25% to all U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico, crude oil very much not excepted. Canada has been the largest source of American crude imports for more than 20 years. More than that, the U.S. oil industry has come to depend on Canada’s thick, sulfurous oil to blend with America’s light, sweet domestic product to suit its highly specialized refineries. If that heavy, gunky stuff suddenly becomes a lot more expensive, so will U.S. oil refining.
Rory Johnston is an oil markets analyst in Toronto. He writes the Commodity Context newsletter, a data-driven look at oil markets and commodity flows. He’s also a lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. He previously led commodities market research at Scotiabank. (And he’s Canadian.)
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Jillian attempt to untangle the pile of spaghetti that is the U.S.-Canadian oil trade. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Jillian Goodman, Heatmap’s deputy editor. Robinson Meyer is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: I want to come back to what would happen if Trump did impose these tariffs, but before we get there, I think it’d be helpful just to understand a little bit more about what life looks like on either side of the border.
You mentioned that Canada has become dependent on the U.S. market for export. My understanding is that the refineries in the Midwest — because they are now used to just using a single source of crude rather than, say, a coastal refinery that might have to be more flexible because they could get crude from Venezuela one day and from Saudi Arabia another day, or something with different qualities. My understanding is that the refineries in the Midwest have become pretty specialized and optimized around refining specifically Canadian crude. Is that correct? And if so, what, what are the features there? How challenging would it be for refiners to switch to other supply in the U.S. if all of a sudden Canadian crude becomes 25% more expensive?
Rory Johnston: Yeah, and you’re absolutely right. So — and I had mentioned earlier, that one aspect of this entrenched relationship is this physical infrastructure, and this other point is this business mode optimization around the specific blend of crude.
Now, for those that aren’t aware, crude oil is not one thing. It is an endless cornucopia soup of hydrocarbons that, generally, we can divide along a two-part axis. On the one hand you have gravity or density, or weight of the crude. And then the other side you have sulfur concentration. Sulfur concentration is always bad because, you know, sulfur’s bad — acid rain, we want to get rid of that. So that costs money to extract. And then the density or the gravity, we talk about this in API gravity. The U.S. crude, like shale crude — that’s often what we call light, tight oil — is often 40 degrees API gravity or higher. It’s very, very, very light. That’s lighter even than WTI, the benchmark itself, whereas Canadian Western Canada select, which is the kind of primary export blend of Canadian crude, is at 22 degrees gravity. Way, way, way, way heavier. One of the heaviest major marketed crudes in the world and the largest, heaviest, marketed grade in the world in terms of size of the particular flow.
So what happens is, well, when you look at the actual blend that is consumed by U.S. refineries, it’s not that they consume a heavy blend of crude. Their blended refinery slate is more of a medium grade. But they have so much light crude, particularly from areas like the North Dakota Bakken, that they need heavy crude to blend and get that kind of medium grade in the middle.
So — to your point, though — that needs to happen. And particularly if you want to, let’s say, keep consuming more U.S. domestic crude in the United States, then you need heavy crude to blend with it to meet those refinery specifications.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.