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If you’ve had the uneasy sense that winter weather isn’t what it used to be, you’re not alone — and you’re probably right. The everyday effects of climate change on the year’s coldest months are quickly becoming too blatant to dismiss.
As annual heat records continue to topple year after year — 2023, now officially the hottest year on record, came terrifyingly close to averaging 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures — winter weather is responding. In some places, it’s turning snowy days into rainy ones. In others, it’s turning cold days bitterly so.
So — what, exactly, is going on? Let’s start with the basics.
The main thing is that climate change is pushing winter temperatures higher. In fact, the average winter temperature is rising faster than that of any other season. Average temperatures in the lower 48 U.S. states from December through February rose by almost 3 degrees Fahrenheit between 1896 and 2021, compared to 2 degrees in spring and 1.5 degrees in summer and fall, federal data show.
The number of days below freezing each year is also on the decline across the country and across the planet. A decade ago, the U.S. was already seeing two weeks less snow cover, on average, than it did in 1972, according to federal data. And parts of the country, including cities in the Northeast and Northwest, are on track to lose over a month of freezing days by midcentury.
But in many places, daily highs and lows aren’t shifting at the same rate. Winter nights, for instance, are warming even faster than winter days — the total number of freezing nights has been dropping in the U.S. since the 1970s. Colder places are also warming more quickly, with the northern U.S. and especially the Northeast experiencing the most significant rise in average winter temperatures.
That dreary, muddy weather that most of the U.S. saw this past Christmas does, admittedly, happen sometimes for natural reasons. Same with the incessant rain that fell (and then turned to ice) across the Midwest and Northeast in mid-January. With every fraction of a degree the planet warms, however, events like these become more likely — or, at least, that’s what hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists concluded in the United Nations’ latest synthesis report on the state of the global climate.
Bingo.
Some evidence suggests that climate change is actually making cold shocks more likely by destabilizing the polar jet stream, which keeps the frigid air in the far northern hemisphere from moving too far southward (and keeps warm air in the tropics from moving too far northward). As a result, the polar vortex that’s normally confined to the Arctic is liable to stretch south and blast bitterly cold air into the contiguous U.S. That’s what happened in mid-January, when temperatures in Montana and the Dakotas dropped as low as -30 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind chill bottomed out at -60 degrees. Cold air from the same weather system blew all the way to Texas.
That said, this evidence is not rock solid. Whether or not it bears out in the long term, it’s important to remember that a warmer world doesn’t mean it will never be cold.
Recent experience notwithstanding, cold snaps — short periods of abnormally cold weather — are going away, too. Their average duration dropped by six days between 1970 and 2021, a Climate Central analysis found.
One of the most predictable consequences of climate change is that, as year-round temperatures soar, an increasing share of annual precipitation will fall as rain rather than snow. That’s just what you get when it’s too warm for water vapor to freeze.
One of the less obvious consequences, it turns out, is that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, enabling it to dump more precipitation — whether that comes as rain, snow, or wintry mix — during a single storm. As a result, even though climate change is making certain places drier, the biggest winter snowstorms are becoming, well, bigger.
This apparent contradiction had a major impact on the parched West in 2023. Drought is expected to become the norm there as the planet warms, fueling epic wildfires and straining already limited water supplies.
But a string of record snowstorms across the West last winter replenished the region’s dwindling snowpack, feeding mountain streams and helping keep drought conditions at bay (and creating a really good year for ski towns). In California, meanwhile, a barrage of atmospheric rivers drenched lower elevations and broke snowfall records in parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
California and its neighbors got off to another rainy (and snowy) start in 2024 — though the recent reprieve from years of severe drought isn’t expected to last.
The best answer we can give you today is to say that yes, snow will most likely still exist. But rising generations probably won’t be able to count on snow falling — and sticking — with the regularity it did when you were their age.
Climate scientists don’t have a perfect picture of how quickly the winters we grew up with will give way to a string of months that are rainy, slushy, and unpredictable, but that’s the direction the evidence is pointing. As global temperatures continue to rise, the trends we’ve seen in winter weather over the past couple of decades aren’t expected to reverse course anytime soon.
Many of the ways climate change affects winter are hard to miss. Snow falls later and less often, and when it does come, it doesn’t last as long. That comes with a few perks for the average American — such as fewer frigid winter days — and huge downsides for the communities, ecosystems, and industries that depend on winter being snowy and cold.
The ramifications of warming winters across the U.S. also extend far beyond the end of the season. Accelerated snowmelt causes plants to green and bloom earlier, which can have cascading effects on soil moisture and drought, as well as on the wildlife that depend on these plants for food and habitat. If snowpack fails to accumulate or melts too early, streams will run dry during the hottest months of the year, when animals, plants, and people need them most.
Traditional strains of some fruit crops — like blueberries, cherries and peaches, for example — don’t grow properly in the spring and summer if the preceding winter was too warm. The increasing volatility of winter weather is also affecting the success rate of wintertime crops, especially in the South. By some estimates, the agriculture sector’s biggest companies could lose tens of billions of dollars in value by 2030 because of climate change.
And pests like ticks and mosquitoes are not only expanding northward, they’re also surviving the winter more easily in their historical range, causing their populations to grow and rates of disease transmission to climb.
Unfortunately, that’s one question we can’t answer — not for every instance of unseasonably warm temperatures everywhere in the world. What we do know for sure is that warmer average temperatures make unseasonable and extreme weather more likely. So in that sense, yes, odds are very good that climate change is playing a role in that thermometer reading.
But also, events rarely have just one cause. Climate change could be exacerbating a natural weather phenomenon, or you might just have gotten a brief winter reprieve. Whether one sultry February day is “because of climate change” isn’t really the point. The point is that, unless and until we stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and start pulling them out, the weather will just keep getting weirder. There is no new normal.
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Elgin Energy Center is back from the dead.
At least one natural gas plant in America’s biggest energy market that was scheduled to shut down is staying open. Elgin Energy Center, an approximately 500 megawatt plant in Illinois approximately 40 miles northwest of downtown Chicago was scheduled to shut down next June, according to filings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and officials from PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest regional transmission organization, governs the relevant portion of the U.S. grid. Elgin’s parent company “no longer intends to deactivate and retire all four units ... at the Elgin Energy Center,” according to a letter dated September 4 and posted to PJM’s website Wednesday.
The Illinois plant is something of a poster child for PJM’s past few years. In 2022, it was one of many natural gas plants to shut down during Winter Storm Elliott as the natural gas distribution seized up. Its then-parent company, Lincoln Power — owned by Cogentrix, the Carlyle Group’s vehicle for its power business — filed for bankruptcy the following year, after PJM assessed almost $40 million in penalties for failing to operate during the storm. In June, a bankruptcy court approved the acquisition of the Elgin plant, along with one other, by Middle River Power, a generation business backed by Avenue Capital, a $12 billion investment firm, in a deal that was closed in December.
The decision to continue operating the plant past its planned deactivation comes as PJM set a new price record at its capacity auction in July, during which generators submitted bids for power that can be deployed when the grid is under stress due to high demand. The $14.7 billion auction was a massive jump from the previous one, which finished at just over $2 billion. Ironically, one reason the most recent auction was so expensive is that PJM gave less credit to natural gas generators for their capacity following Winter Storm Elliott, which then drove up auction prices, leading to large payouts for gas plants. PJM said the high auction prices were “caused primarily by a large number of generator retirements.”
In a bankruptcy court filing in 2023, Lincoln Power’s chief restructuring officer said that the company “was experiencing a liquidity crunch” due to low prices in past capacity auction, which meant that it had “received significantly less revenues for the capacity they sold in those Capacity Auctions as compared to previous Capacity Auctions.” With higher capacity revenues in PJM, presumably Elgin's business has improved.
Many analysts are skeptical that PJM can quickly get new load onto the system to bring prices down meaningfully in subsequent auctions — the next one is in December — and the PJM queue for new projects is absurdly clogged. This only juices the incentives for older fossil plants to stay open.
“This shortage of capacity is happening immediately,” Nicholas Freschi, senior associate at Gabel Associates, told me last week. “There might be more resources, and PJM might be able to coerce some retiring or not participating plants to make up for the shortfall. It’s an immediate problem.”
Neither Middle River nor its attorney representing the company before FERC returned requests for comment.
On the presidential debate, California’s wildfires, and the nuclear workforce
Current conditions: Hurricane Francine is approaching Louisiana as a Category 1 storm • The streets of Vietnam’s capital of Hanoi are flooded after Typhoon Yagi, and the death toll has reached 143 • Residents of Nigeria’s northern Borno state are urged to watch out for crocodiles and snakes that escaped from a zoo due to flooding.
Former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris squared off on the debate stage in Philadelphia last night. Here are some important climate and energy highlights from the evening:
Three large wildfires – the Line fire, the Bridge fire, and the Airport fire – are burning in Southern California, fueled by intense heat and thick, dry vegetation. Already more than 100,000 acres have been scorched. The Line fire is closing in on the popular vacation destination Big Bear, and is threatening some 65,000 structures. Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said the scale of the emergencies is straining firefighting resources, and FEMA is sending financial aid to the state. In neighboring Nevada, the Davis Fire has grown to nearly 6,000 acres and is burning toward ski resorts in Tahoe. Temperatures in the region started to cool yesterday after a long and brutal heat wave. The weather shift could help firefighters bring the blazes under control.
The White House is launching an American Climate Corps national tour this fall to highlight the work being carried out by corps members in different communities and showcase important projects. The events will feature remarks from the administration and other officials, roundtable talks with ACC members, and swearing-in ceremonies. The tour began in Maine this week with a focus on climate resilience and urban forestry, and heads to Arizona next week. The rest of the schedule is as follows, with more dates to come:
The number of students studying to become nuclear engineers is declining as demand for carbon-free nuclear energy is on the rise, according toThe Wall Street Journal. Citing data from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, the Journal reported that just 454 students in the U.S. graduated with a degree in the field in 2022, down 25% from a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the industry’s workforce is aging. “We need nuclear expertise in order to combat climate change,” said Sara Pozzi, professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan. “We are at a crucial point where we need to produce the new generation of nuclear experts so that they can work with the older generation and learn from them.” The drop in new recruits comes down to nuclear’s image problem thanks to public disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the Journal speculated.
Critical metal refining company Nth Cycle announced this week it has become the first company to produce nickel and cobalt mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) in the U.S. following the opening of its commercial-scale facility in Ohio. The company’s “Oyster” technology uses electricity to turn recyclable industrial scrap and mined ore into MHP, a key component in clean-energy technologies like batteries. “This revolutionary innovation replaces pyrometallurgy with one of the cleanest technologies in the world, and accelerates the net zero targets of the public and private sector,” the company said in a press release. It claims the Ohio unit can produce 900 metric tons of MHP per year, which would be enough to supply batteries for 22 million cell phones. The company says its process reduces emissions by 90% compared to traditional mining methods and can help EV manufacturers meet the IRA’s sourcing requirements.
A new nationwide poll of 1,000 registered U.S. voters found that 90% of respondents support President Biden’s federal clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, including 78% of respondents who said they were Trump voters.
Maybe you’ve never heard of it. Maybe you know it too well. But to a certain type of clean energy wonk, it amounts to perhaps the three most dreaded words in climate policy: the interconnection queue.
The queue is the process by which utilities decide which wind and solar farms get to hook up to the power grid in the United States. Across much of the country, it has become so badly broken and clogged that it can take more than a decade for a given project to navigate.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with two experts about how to understand — and how to fix — what is perhaps the biggest obstacle to deploying more renewables on the U.S. power grid. Tyler Norris is a doctoral student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He was formerly vice president of development at Cypress Creek Renewables, and he served on North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper’s Carbon Policy Working Group. Claire Wayner is a senior associate at RMI’s carbon-free electricity program, where she works on the clean and competitive grids team. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Can I interject and just ask why, over the past decade, the interconnection queue got much longer — but also over the past decade, 15 years, the U.S. grid did change in character and in fuel type a lot, right? We went from burning a lot of coal to a lot of natural gas. And that transition is often cited as one of the model transitions, one of the few energy transitions to happen globally that happened at the speed with which we would need to decarbonize. Obviously, switching coal to gas is not decarbonizing, but it is a model — it happened fast enough that it is a good model for what decarbonizing would look like in order to meet climate goals.
Evidently, that did not run into these kind of same interconnection queue problems. Why is that? Is that because we were swapping in within individual power plants? We were just changing the furnace from a coal furnace to a gas furnace? Is that because these were larger projects and so it didn’t back up in the queue in the same way that a lot of smaller solar or wind farms do?
Claire Wayner: I would say all the reasons you just gave are valid, yeah. The coal to gas transition involved, likely, a lot of similar geographic locations. With wind and solar, we’re seeing them wanting to build on the grid and in a lot of cases in new, rather remote locations that are going to require new types of grid upgrades that the coal to gas transition just doesn’t have.
Jesse Jenkins: Maybe it is — to use a metaphor here — it’s a little bit like traffic congestion. If you add a generator to the grid, it’s trying to ship its power through the grid, and that decision to add your power mix to the grid combines with everyone else that’s also generating and consuming power to drive traffic jams or congestion in different parts of the grid, just like your decision to hop in the car and drive to work or to go into the city for the weekend to see a show or whatever you’re doing. It’s not just your decision. It’s everyone’s combined decisions that affects travel times on the grid.
Now, the big difference between the grid and travel on roads or most other forms of networks we’re used to is that you don’t get to choose which path to go down. If you’re sending electricity to the grid, electricity flows with physics down the path of least resistance or impedance, which is the alternating current equivalent of resistance. And so it’s a lot more like rivers flowing downhill from gravity, right? You don’t get to choose which branch of the river you go down. It’s just, you know, gravity will take you. And so you adding your power flows to the grid creates complicated flows based on the physics of this mesh network that spans a continent and interacts with everyone else on the grid.
And so when you’re going from probably a few dozen large natural gas generators added that operate very similarly to the plants that they’re replacing to hundreds of gigawatts across thousands of projects scattered all over the grid with very complicated generation profiles because they’re weather-dependent renewables, it’s just a completely different challenge for the utilities.
So the process that the regional grid operators developed in the 2000s, when they were restructuring and taking over that role of regional grid operator, it’s just not fit for purpose at all for what we face today. And I want to highlight another thing you mentioned, which is the software piece of it, too. These processes, they are using software and corporate processes that were also developed 10 or 20 years ago. And we all know that software and computing techniques have gotten quite a bit better over a decade or two. And rarely have utilities and grid operators really kept pace with those capabilities.
Wayner: Can I just say, I’ve heard that in some regions, interconnection consists of still sending back and forth Excel files. To Tyler’s point earlier that we only just now are getting data on the interconnection queue nationwide and how it stands, that’s one challenge that developers are facing is a lack of data transparency and rapid processing from the transmission providers and the grid operators.
And so, to use an analogy that my colleague Sarah Toth uses a lot, which I really love: Imagine if we had a Domino’s pizza tracker for the interconnection queue, and that developers could just log on and see how their projects are doing in many, if not most regions. They don’t even have that visibility. They don’t know when their pizza is going to get delivered, or if it’s in the oven.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.