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Our deliver-everything era is crashing into a hotter planet.
When my phone dinged with the delivery notification, I raced outside to get the package into my apartment. I was not afraid of parcel theft, but of the sauna-like temps outside. One of 2023’s unbearable summer heat waves had descended upon Los Angeles, and my wife’s package of cosmetics contained creams and solutions with very specific instructions about how they should be safely stored. They weren’t the kinds of things you want to leave out in the sun as the thermometer approaches 100.
This year’s record-setting temperatures come at a time when Americans have fully embraced the power of online shopping. We have just about everything delivered — not just the durable goods that have always been sent through the mail, but perishable items like makeup, medicine, and meal prep kits. That adds up to a lot of extra deliveries happening during the dog days of a climate-changed summer.
The first thing to worry about are the men and women in the trucks. While office workers can turn up the air conditioning to mitigate extreme summer temperatures, delivery drivers spend their sweltering days getting in and out of vehicles that may or may not have AC. This summer, a U.S Postal Service letter carrier in Texas died while working on a day with a heat index in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Media reports have found drivers from parcel services like UPS and FedEx who say they suffer heat exhaustion from working in a truck with only a small fan to keep them cool, or are afraid to spend too much time in the vehicle’s unventilated cargo hold on a hot day.
Those organizations are now making changes to counter the increasingly dangerous summers. UPS reached a deal with its union to put AC in new trucks bought after January 1, 2024, and to retrofit old ones with solutions such as heat shields. In some areas, USPS has considered changing its delivery schedule, allowing drivers to start earlier in the morning to beat the afternoon heat.
These changes should help to protect drivers. But what about their deliveries? Packages sent during summer spend plenty of time in hot distribution centers and in the blistering backs of trucks where drivers fear to tread. If nobody’s home when the delivery comes, boxes spend hours or days in sweltering outdoors temperatures. The phenomenon has led to many social media conversations in which users ask one another whether their boxes full of delicate fragrances or HelloFresh meal prep kits are still safe to use or eat after long exposure to this insufferable summer.
Meal kits are shipped in temperature-controlled packaging meant to endure a day or two outside, with insulation and cold packs in place to keep food from warming up in transit and spoiling before it ever gets in the fridge. Abigail Dreher, the associate director of corporate communications for HelloFresh, told me that the company already optimizes how temperature-resistant it makes its packaging based on climate. Somebody receiving the ingredients to make golden chicken schnitzel in Tucson, Arizona will have their food packaged with more cold-keeping power than someone who, say, orders a kit for chicken wings in Buffalo.
As summer temperatures around the nation rise, though, shippers will need to use more and more insulating materials. “We test for temperatures up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit,” Dreher says, “and every year we plan for a 3-degree Fahrenheit average increase in temperatures, which increases the amount of cold-packaging going to hot destinations used year over year.” So far, however, HelloFresh has been able to offset this increase in packaging by using less insulation for meal kits bound for colder places.
That’s good news for sustainability, because while many insulating layers used for shipping are curbside-recyclable, some must be thrown away — including those gel packs used to keep shipments cold. “We are continuously searching for biodegradable/compostable alternatives to our gel packs,” Dreher says. “However, we do not yet have a solution that can be sourced at the scale which we need.”
The same trend goes for not only food but any contents that must be temperature-controlled. Medication, says GoodRx, “can change physically or chemically” when moved or stored in extreme temperatures. Medicines like insulin that must stay cool come in cold packaging, and many temperature-sensitive drugs are shipped with color-changing test strips or some other safeguard meant to tell the recipient whether the contents have been exposed to extreme temps.
The most likely outcome is that more shoppers will be caught in no-man's land upon opening their packages. If that meal kit delivery has sat under the sun for hours — and the steak inside is still cool, thanks to the packaging, but maybe not as cold as it once was — should you still cook and eat it? If that box of medicines endured a day in the 100-degree heat, but doesn’t look any different, should you take them, or send them back? A sea of judgment calls await.
Another possibility: higher shipping costs. Merchants who sell heat-sensitive products already have a variety of temperature controlled shipping options at their disposal, from specialized hardy containers to keep cargo at room temperature or colder to real-time temperature monitoring to “cold chain centers” to keep items cool while they await distribution. In addition, sellers may be tempted to choose faster shipping options to minimize the in-transit exposure to summer temperatures — costs that, no doubt, will be passed on to the home shopper.
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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.