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Current conditions: Warm temperatures in the Pacific Northwest and Central Plains could set daily records • Jet stream to dump “extended” rain on California • It’ll hit nearly 60 degrees today in Kansas City, whose Chiefs are headed to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years to face the San Francisco 49ers.
Earnings season continues this week with 106 S&P 500 companies on deck to report to investors in the next five days. Upcoming calls with automakers in particular could offer additional insight into the purported “slowing” of the electric vehicle market. Here is where things currently stand:
The European Union’s climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, said that the energy transition will mean a “heavy change” for industries on the continent but warned against the “false narrative” that climate action comes at the cost of business and innovation, The Financial Timesreported Monday. Hoekstra’s comments came ahead of an intended proposal by Brussels that the EU cut emissions by 90% of 1990 levels by 2040.
While the aggressive proposition would need to be agreed upon by EU governments before becoming law, environmental regulations have already rankled farmers in Germany, Poland, Romania, Belgium, and France — where farmers even threatened to put Paris “under siege” on Monday — while right-wing politicians have attacked green policies and industrialists have blamed “red tape” for holding up innovation. “We need to stand on two legs: one leg is climate action, the other leg is the just transition, competitiveness, and a thriving business community, because both are needed,” Hoekstra said.
On Sunday, a pair of activists threw soup at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre museum in Paris — although Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, which has seen this kind of thing before and resides safely behind fortified glass, was not damaged.
\ud83e\uddba ACTION EN COURS - PARIS\n\nDimanche 28 janvier. 10h00\n\n2 citoyennes engag\u00e9es avec la nouvelle campagne Riposte Alimentaire ont asperg\u00e9 de soupe le tableau \u201cLa Joconde\u201d mondialement connu, expos\u00e9 au Mus\u00e9e du Louvre. [1]\n#RiposteAlimentaire #A22Network #Joconde #Louvre— (@)
The demonstrators identified themselves as belonging to Riposte Alimentaire, which The Washington Postdescribes as a “food security protest group” under the umbrella of the A22 Network, which also includes the climate groups Just Stop Oil and Last Generation. “Farmers are squeezed by the pressures of mass distribution, going so far as to make them sell at a loss,” Riposte Alimentaire said in French, according to the Post. “Our agricultural and food system also has extremely worrying environmental consequences.”
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Last week, Chicago Mayor Mayor Brandon introduced an ordinance that would ban natural gas for cooking and heating in most new construction. “This is a critical first step for [Chicago] to take towards a planned transition away from fossil fuels,” Leslie Perkins, the chief of staff and policy director for the city’s Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy, toldUtility Drive at the time. However, the ordinance faces an uphill battle, The Chicago Tribune argued in a Sunday editorial. “Better to wait and see what the statewide policy is on the future of natural gas,” the authors wrote, stressing examples like Berkeley, California, which has been unable to enforce its version of a gas ban after a federal appeals court ruled the city doesn’t have the authority. Additionally, “much of the power keeping lights on in Chicagoland comes from nuclear energy (which doesn’t emit carbon) and, ironically enough, gas (which does),” the op-ed authors pointed out. “It’s not economically feasible to build new nuclear plants at present, so any increased electricity demand will be met mostly by burning gas.”
Over the weekend, Maui police identified the 100th victim of the August 8 Lahaina wildfire as Lydia Coloma, 70. She was also the last unidentified victim and was ID’ed using “the context of the location where the remains were found,” rather than by DNA or other methods, The Associated Pressreports.
Coloma is one of nine members of her family who died in the wildfire, as well as the first victim to be identified since November 11. Police said three other people still remain unaccounted for, down from more than 1,000 in the immediate aftermath of the fire.
“What lies for the future for the Osage? Energy is the front end of our business. The other part of it is the environmental stewardship of this reservation.” —Everett Waller, chairman of the Osage Minerals Council, who also plays Paul Red Eagle in Killers of the Flower Moon. A federal judge has sided with the Osage Nation against Italian utility Enel, which has been ordered to remove 84 wind turbines from tribal land found in violation of the Osage mineral estate.
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Has Plug Power pulled the plug on its upstate New York facility?
In 2021, top elected officials in New York state promised that Plug Power, a nascent company in the growing hydrogen industry, would build a large hydrogen fuel production facility in the Buffalo-Rochester area. It was supposed to make the state an industry leader.
Today, the project is looking more like a warning sign about the perils of being a first-mover in the unproven hydrogen business.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Plug Power, an American hydrogen and fuel cell producer founded in 1997, believed it would capitalize on rising demand for the liquid fuel when it broke ground at its hydrogen production facility at Genesee County’s Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park in 2021, a project known colloquially as STAMP. Heavy polluting industries like steel and transportation were chomping at the bit to strike supply deals for hydrogen, a liquid fuel that produces no carbon when burned. And this New York plant would on paper be particularly attractive from a climate perspective: It would be powered by hydroelectric dams at Niagara Falls, offering a potential carbon reduction of an estimated 14,000 tons of CO2 per year. It would also be the largest project of its kind in the Northeast.
Three years later and the project appears to be on ice, according to a phone call recording between New York county officials and a real estate developer that was obtained by Heatmap News.
Construction stopped in January, per the call, as did work Plug Power promised to do on an electrical substation that will also power a neighboring semiconductor manufacturing plant. Now energy-hungry data center developers are bidding to pick up the substation work instead in exchange for a spot at STAMP and access to some of the remaining hydroelectricity, and county officials are looking at buying Plug Power’s electrical equipment.
It is unclear whether the hydrogen production plant will ever be completed.
“They’ve put things on hold and now we’re coming to pick up the pieces,” Chris Suozzi, an executive vice president at the Genessee County Economic Development Authority, told one bidder – PRP Real Estate Management – on a call last month. PRP taped the call and shared it with us after it was first reported by local news nonprofit InvestigativePost. Suozzi also said on the call: “They’re not ready to go. They’re on pause. We don’t know what’s going to happen with them at this point.”
The New York Plug Power plant’s problems should be familiar to anyone in the climate tech startup space but for the unfamiliar, the company’s rapid growth seems to have run headlong into struggles with cash. A year ago Plug Power said in an investor filing there was a “substantial” concern the company may not have “sufficient funds to fund [its] operations through the next 12 months.” So problematic are Plug’s financial woes that they’ve become a political target; after the Energy Department offered a $1.6 billion conditional loan commitment to Plug for building hydrogen production plants, Republicans in Congress called for an inspector general investigation into the move.
But the New York production facility won’t benefit from the potential loan either. We’ve learned from two sources familiar with the matter that the project is not included in its potential loan application currently pending before DOE.
Then there has been the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act. Even though the project relies on carbon-free hydropower, it may not qualify for the IRA’s hydrogen production tax credit because of proposed requirements for fuel to rely on new renewable energy sources (known as “additionality”). This has been a major sticking point in implementation of the credit, and Plug Power is quoted in InvestigativePost last week linking the work stoppage at the production facility on waiting for the final regulation implementing the credit. This is even as the company uses the yet-to-be finalized credit in its financial analyses for other hydrogen facilities in operation today, like this one in Georgia.
Environmental justice issues have also been a drag on development. The native Tonawanda Seneca Nation is opposed to the entire industrial park because of the resulting impacts on wildlife, noise and the visual landscape. In April, the Fish and Wildlife Service revoked a necessary permit for a wastewater treatment pipeline that would be used by companies at the park.
Earthjustice attorney Alex Page – who is working with the Nation to fight the project – told me the tribe was told last year by the Energy Department that Plug Power had withdrawn the New York site from its loan application. The Nation will continue to fight the project and DOE’s loan financing to Plug Power on the chance that money could be reprogrammed to the industrial park. Page said: “The Nation remains very, very much opposed.”
We sent Plug Power multiple requests for comment as well as Suozzi. A representative for Plug Power declined to answer questions about the project. I got a text from a number listed for Suozzi asking to chat later, but I didn’t hear back before publication.
The week’s biggest fights around renewable energy
1. San Diego County, California – The battery backlash just got stronger after the city of Escondido, California, indefinitely banned permits to the entire sector in reaction to a battery fire last month.
2. Waldo County, Maine – The potential first floating offshore wind assembly site in America is now one step further in the permitting process, after Maine’s Department of Transportation released a pre-application alternatives analysis required for federal environmental reviews.
3. Dickinson County, Kansas – This one county may be a bellwether for future problems in Kansas, a state with many existing wind farms — and even more potential — but also a lot of opposition.
4. Washoe County, Nevada – The company behind the Burning Man festival will be acquiring nearby geothermal energy leases, in a settlement resolving litigation that had the high-profile naturalist escape challenging access to a renewable energy resource.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In North Carolina, the Kerr Lake Solar project proposed by Cypress Creek Renewables is facing its own apparent local onslaught at community meetings.
In California, Capstone and Eurowind Energy are seeking permission to build a long-duration battery storage facility in Alameda County.
In New Jersey, a coalition of shore towns and opposition groups fighting the EDF-Shell Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm have issued a new missive criticizing state financial benefits to the project.
In New York, the town of Oyster Bay looks like it’ll be extending its moratorium on BESS for at least another six months.
In Pennsylvania, a Pivot Energy solar farm also has some local organizing in the way.
Why alarm bells are ringing in the renewable energy ecosystem, plus more policy news
IRA on the mind – The renewable energy ecosystem is starting to really sound alarm bells about the November election and the risks of what they’re calling a “clean energy plan repeal” – e.g. scrapping IRA credits and carbon pollution rules.
No Golden climate bill – However, if Kamala Harris and the Democrats do win in November, I’m bearish on the odds of another big piece of renewables stimulus passing through Congress next term.
Data center moratoriums – Energy demand for tech may be a driver of renewables development across the country, but data centers are starting to face moratoria fights of their own.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, the Solar Energy Industries Association and American Clean Power are rallying behind comprehensive decarb stimulus legislation.
In Louisiana, voters going to the polls will decide whether to increase revenues from offshore energy – including wind – that go to coastal restoration.