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Inside season 2, episode 8 of Shift Key.
In just over a month, America will elect hundreds of thousands of people to state, county, and municipal offices. While those elections might lack the splashiness of the race for the White House or Congress, they could shape how and whether the United States fights climate change. So which elections matter most?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, a group that tries to do ‘Moneyball for climate policy,’ analyzing the races that could matter most for the country’s decarbonization. A winner of the Grist 50 award, Spears formerly worked in the solar industry and now leads the growing organization. We dive into which offices have the most sway role over adaptation and mitigation and which races deserve your attention in 2024. 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.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Caroline Spears: One of the races that is critically important for climate this year is elected utility commissions. They’re not elected in every state, but in about 10 states across the country, voters show up to their ballot box, and they elect the electricity regulatory body for their state.
Should that be an elected position? Listen, it’s not for me to decide. Democracy has decided that electricity regulatory bodies are elected in many states, so here we are. In a bunch of other states, they’re appointed and then confirmed by the state legislature. So there’s this interesting mix of when democracy shows up in these races, in these offices. There are a few public utility commission districts up this November. I really want to highlight the ones happening in Arizona and Montana this year — we’re really watching those, we’re excited to see where those go.
In both cases, climate champions are one and four or zero and five in those states, which means — literally, we are so far from a climate majority in either of those states. And this has real world impacts. So, for example, let’s talk about Montana really quick. That solar company that I used to work for: The Montana Public Service Commission unfairly changed the avoided cost rate, the rate at which we would get compensated, when solar started entering the market. And there’s this hot mic moment where an elected Montana Public Service Commissioner says, “Well, this will kill solar in the state,” and then voted for it. So that’s the power that these public service commissions have, and they’re up for election. They’re up for election this November. So they’re really important.
In Arizona, we’re supporting all three climate champions running. The one person I really want to highlight today is Ylenia Aguilar. She served on the water commission in Arizona, so she has a great knowledge of that intersection between climate and water issues in the state, and just last month she made national news for her work trying to cool down classrooms in Arizona from heating. So she’s someone who can bring together climate, knowledge of what it takes to be on an electricity regulatory commission, and the personal impact of how it actually shows up in people’s lives. So this is the exact type of person you want running for the seat. I’m really excited about those races, but those will be tough.
Jesse Jenkins: And I’ll just add, so these commissions are often in charge of effectively approving the investments and plans of the regulated utilities in the state. In some states, those are only network utilities. So they’re the ones investing in transmission and distribution lines, deciding how to make sure those are resilient to climate damages as we’re seeing from wildfires and floods and hurricanes and everything else.
In other states, like Arizona and Montana, they also oversee utilities that control power generation, as well. So should they be investing in new natural gas plants? Or should they be investing in batteries and solar? For example. Those kinds of decisions go before the utility commission for approval or disapproval before the utilities can earn returns on the investments they make in those areas — or make investments. And as you mentioned, they also set rates both for retail customers — so, you know, what’s the net metering policy? How are we incentivizing flexible EV charging? — and then the rates for, in some cases, avoided costs for larger-scale generators that are connecting to the grid in partial competition frameworks. Lots and lots of other rules.
They’ll be the ones in charge of implementing, usually, clean electricity standards — and in some states, like Arizona, they even have the authority to establish one themselves. So really, really influential bodies.
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.
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.
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On the DOE’s transmission projects, Cybertruck recalls, and Antarctic greening
Current conditions: Hurricane Kirk, now a Category 4 storm, could bring life-threatening surf and rip currents to the East Coast this weekend • The New Zealand city of Dunedin is flooded after its rainiest day in more than 100 years • Parts of the U.S. may be able to see the Northern Lights this weekend after the sun released its biggest solar flare since 2017.
The Energy Department yesterday announced $1.5 billion in investments toward four grid transmission projects. The selected projects will “enable nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity throughout Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, while creating nearly 9,000 good-paying jobs,” the DOE said in a statement. One of the projects, called Southern Spirit, will involve installing a 320-mile high-voltage direct current line across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that connects Texas’ ERCOT grid to the larger U.S. grid for the first time. This “will enhance reliability and prevent outages during extreme weather events,” the DOE said. “This is a REALLY. BIG. DEAL,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek.
The DOE also released a study examining grid demands through 2050 and concluded that the U.S. will need to double or even triple transmission capacity by 2050 compared to 2020 to meet growing electricity demand.
Duke Energy, one of the country’s largest utilities, appears to be walking back its commitment to ditch coal by 2035. In a new plan released yesterday, Duke said it would not shut down the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the U.S., Gibson Station in Indiana, in 2035 as previously planned, but would instead run it through 2038. The company plans to retrofit the plant to run on natural gas as well as coal, with similar natural-gas conversions planned for other coal plants. The company also slashed projects for expanding renewables. According toBloomberg, a Duke spokeswoman cited increasing power demand for the changes. Electricity demand has seen a recent surge in part due to a boom in data centers. Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a consumer and environmental advocacy group, noted that Duke’s modeling has Indiana customers paying 4% more each year through 2030 “as Duke continues to cling to its coal plants and wastes hundreds of millions on gasifying coal.”
The Edison Electric Institute issued its latest electric vehicle forecast, anticipating EV trends through 2035. Some key projections from the trade group’s report:
Tesla issued another recall for the Cybertruck yesterday, the fifth recall for the electric pickup since its launch at the end of last year. The new recall has to do with the rearview camera, which apparently is too slow to display an image to the driver when shifting into reverse. It applies to about 27,000 trucks (which is pretty much all of them), but an over-the-air software update to fix the problem has already been released. There were no reports of injuries or accidents from the defect.
A new study published in Nature found that vegetation is expanding across Antarctica’s northernmost region, known as the Antarctic Peninsula. As the planet warms, plants like mosses and lichen are growing on rocks where snow and ice used to be, resulting in “greening.” Examining satellite data, the researchers from the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire, and the British Antarctic Survey, were shocked to discover that the peninsula has seen a tenfold increase in vegetation cover since 1986. And the rate of greening has accelerated by over 30% since 2016. This greening is “creating an area suitable for more advanced plant life or invasive species to get a foothold,” co-author Olly Bartlett, a University of Hertfordshire researcher, told Inside Climate News. “These rates of change we’re seeing made us think that perhaps we’ve captured the start of a more dramatic transformation.”
Moss on Ardley Island in the Antarctic. Dan Charman/Nature
Japan has a vast underground concrete tunnel system that was built to take on overflow from excess rain water and prevent Tokyo from flooding. It’s 50 meters underground, and nearly 4 miles long.
Carl Court/Getty Images
While the impact so far has been light, there are some snarls to watch out for.
The American renewables industry is a global industry. While the Biden administration has devoted three-plus years and billions of dollars to building up wind and solar supply chains in the United States, many of the components of renewable energy generation — whether it’s the cells that make up solar panels or the 1,500-ton monopiles that serve as the foundation for offshore wind turbines — are manufactured overseas in from Spain to Denmark all across East and Southeast Asia.
With the members International Longshoremen Association on strike in the U.S. due to a contract dispute with the United States Maritime Alliance, shutting down ports up and down the Gulf and Atlantic Coast, one might wonder, what happens to U.S. renewables development?
The answer so far is: Not much. The closure of these ports’ cargo operations has not yet had a massive effect on the U.S. economy outside of businesses that work directly with the shipping industry, like trucking. There is no single port — or coast, even — that serves as a chokepoint for renewables-related imports. Many components from East and Southeast Asia come through west coast ports that are staffed by longshoremen in a different union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union; shipments were being diverted there for weeks leading up to the strike.
That’s not to say the industry can simply coast through a prolonged strike. But there are some differences between different sectors, especially wind and solar.
Much of the wind industry, especially offshore, runs on foreign-manufactured equipmentthat is then processed and assembled in the United States. “Almost 70% of all wind-specific imports that are tracked through trade codes came from Mexico, Germany, Spain, and India, with the remaining imports mostly from Canada and various countries in Europe and Asia,” according to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report on the wind industry.
At least so far, much of the wind business — including the offshore wind business — appears to have largely dodged substantial issues from the strike so far.
Orsted’s work at three East Coast ports in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York has been unaffected, a source familiar with the situation told me. And the Portsmouth Marine Terminal in Virginia, where 70 of those monopiles have been shipped, is continuing to operate normally, according to the Port of Virginia. (Virginia's offshore wind industry is still vulnernable to vagaries of international trade — last year, Siemens Gamesa cancelled a plan to build a blade manufacturing facility in Virginia, where Dominion Energy is working on an offshore wind project.)
While the East Coast is an active hub of offshore wind activity, if the greater wind industry were to be affected by a prolonged strike, it would likely happen in Texas, which is both a major importer of wind equipment and has the country’s largest wind power sector.
Texas is “the dominant entry point” for wind equipment, according to the Lawrence Berkeley report, with almost $1 billion in annual wind imports.
At least one of those ports is still operating. The Port of Galveston is so-far unaffected by the strike, a port spokesperson told me. The port has become a major importer of wind turbines. In June, the port said that 400 wind turbine components had come through the port just since April, and that another 300 or so would flow through “over the coming months.” So far this year, some 25,742 tons of turbine pieces have come through the port, largely from Spain, Denmark, and other countries in Europe.
Neighboring Port Houston, however, is being picketed and “not handling container operations at this time,” the Houston Chronicle reported. In the run-up to the strike, Port Houston said that imports of wind power equipment had “increased notably” in August. In 2020, the port imported some 19,000 tons of wind power equipment.
The Houston area also has a number of recently opened solar manufacturing facilities, where cells, often imported from Asia, are assembled into panels. Proximity to the port was one reason why the manufacturers set up in shop in the area, according to the Houston Chronicle. “When you look at Houston specifically, you have one of the best ports in the country,” SEG Solar chief executive Jim Wood said in a company release when the facility opened. (SEG Solar has said it plans to start manufacturing cells domestically, though it currently makes them in Indonesia.)
Sophie Karp, an analyst at KeyBanc, forecast in a note to clients that some renewables manufacturers could be “disproportionately affected” by the strike. U.S. manufacturer First Solar “is the top importer at the Port of Houston,” Karp wrote, importing the equivalent of 17,200 shipping containers in the last year. The Korean solar company Qcells, meanwhile, which has made massive investments in Georgia, is a major customer of the Port of Savannah, which has been shut down due to the strike and has imported 31,400 container equivalents, according to KeyBanc. Karp also speculated that companies like the inverter manufacturer Enphase or the solar tracking company Array “are likely to have some exposure through their supply chains as well.”
“If the strike continues for an extended period, supply disruptions in the U.S. solar market are likely,” Karp wrote — especially for solar companies “that do not have ample inventory cushion on the ground.”
Trade disruptions are nothing new for the solar industry, which saw imports slow in 2022after the passage of a law meant to ban companies from subsidizing forced labor in Xinjiang in Western China, where much of the raw material for the world’s polysilicon is mined. Just this week, fresh tariffs were slapped on solar cells from manufacturers in Southeast Asia, which officials say function as cover for Chinese solar businesses. In fact, the California Chamber of Commerce specifically warned of congestion in the state’s ports as solar companies hurried up their purchases of panels ahead of the new duty.
So far, the solar and renewables industry has been quiet about the strike, in comparison to their unified voice on tariffs. Other portions of the electrical industry have been more vocal.
“The electroindustry is one of the largest manufacturing sectors of the U.S. economy, with one of the most complex international supply chains of any industry,” Debra Phillips, president of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, said in a statement. “Over $195 million per day of electroindustry goods, representing nearly 30% of the nation’s electroindustry imports, is now stranded in unloaded cargo ships, threatening widespread disruption to our critical grid infrastructure.”
NEMA was one of more than 250 business groups that signed a letter published Wednesdaythat called on the Biden White House to “to take immediate action to resolve this situation expeditiously.” While one major clean energy group, the American Clean Power Association, signed the letter, others such as the Solar Energy Industries Association and Advanced Energy United, did not.
On Mayorkas’ warning, damage at the Palisades plant, and violence against women
Current conditions: Typhoon Krathon has made landfall in Tawain with 100 mph wind gusts • Hurricane Kirk became a Category 3 storm but is not yet threatening land • The October heat wave baking California has yet to break.
The death toll from Hurricane Helene is nearing 200, which makes it the second-deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since 2000. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 killed 1,392 people. President Biden and Vice President Harris toured affected areas yesterday, alongside Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “We have towns that have disappeared, literally,” Mayorkas said. “This is a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year recovery.” Search and rescue operations continue in remote Appalachia, with nearly 5,000 federal personnel on the ground. Mayorkas said the government had shipped “over 8.8 million meals, more than 7.4 million liters of water, 150 generators, and more than 225,000 tarps to the region.” He warned that FEMA “does not have the funds” to get through the rest of hurricane season.
Meanwhile, election officials are working to restore some level of secure voting access in hard-hit North Carolina, a battleground state in the upcoming presidential election. More than 190,000 people in the state had requested mail-in ballots before Helene, but the Postal Service has suspended operations, Gristreported. “The destruction is unprecedented and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of North Carolina’s top election officials, told reporters.
A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found more than 1 million homes (and their 4 million occupants) in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are at serious risk of flooding – ranking among the top 25% of riskiest properties in the country. This includes some inland areas like Buffalo and Newark. In Brooklyn, the number of households at risk exceeds those of anywhere else in the tri-state area. More than 400,000 of the buildings that are at risk of flooding in these states are located in low- or moderate-income communities. “This risk has grown in recent years and is projected to continue increasing,” the report said.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan has damage in its steam generators that “far exceeded” estimates, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The plant shut down in 2022 but is aiming to re-open late next year. This week the Energy Department finalized over $2.8 billion in loans and grants to help restart the plant and generate emissions-free power. The NRC found that 1,163 steam generator tubes showed signs of stress corrosion cracking, which the plant’s owner, Holtec, said it wasn’t surprised given that the plant was not maintained during its shutdown. Holtec said the damage would be repaired and that they’re still on track to re-open next year. “Steam generators are sensitive components that require meticulous maintenance and are among the most expensive units at a nuclear power station,” according to Reuters.
Over in Illinois, the first large-scale industrial carbon capture and storage facility in the U.S. is reportedly leaking. Archer-Daniels-Midland has paused operations at the site in Decatur after signs of a potential brine fluid leak were detected at the end of September. Some locals are worried the facility could threaten drinking water, a concern ADM has dismissed.
A new study published in the journal PLOS Climate finds that some “climate shocks” – like storms, floods, and landslides – are associated with a rise in violence against women that can linger for two years. The researchers examined data about intimate partner violence taken from 363 surveys across 156 countries between 1993 and 2019. They compared this data to climate shocks and found a significant link. The relationship was exacerbated in poorer countries. Interestingly, climate shocks such as earthquakes and wildfires did not appear connected to higher rates of violence against women, but the researchers can’t figure out exactly why. “We need further work to understand why these disasters impact on violence against women, and climate resilience strategies need to consider how to integrate violence prevention in the future,” said study co-author Dr. Andrew Gibbs, a social psychologist at the University of Exeter.
Tesla announced third-quarter sales figures yesterday, revealing that global sales were up 6.4%. This marks the first quarterly increase this year, perhaps signaling an EV rebound.