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Current conditions: Tropical storm Filipo will make landfall on Mozambique’s coast today • Morel season has begun in parts of the Midwest • It is cold and cloudy in Stockholm, where police forcibly removed climate activst Greta Thunberg from the entrance to parliament.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Climate and energy ‘figure prominently’ in Biden’s budget
President Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget yesterday, and his “climate and energy promises figured prominently,” reportedE&E News. Biden requested $17.8 billion for the Interior Department to help with climate resilience, national parks, wildfire management, tribal programs, ecosystem restoration, and water infrastructure in the west. He wants $11 billion for the EPA and $51 billion for the Department of Energy to tackle climate change and help fund the energy transition. The proposal calls for funding toward expanding the “Climate Corps.” Biden also asked Congress to put $500 million into the international Green Climate Fund in 2025, and then more in the following years. And he wants to make this spending mandatory. The budget would also “cut wasteful subsidies to Big Oil and other special interests,” Biden said. As Morning Brewnoted, the budget proposal has “about as much chance of getting passed by Congress as a bill guaranteeing each American a pet unicorn, so it’s mostly a statement of Biden’s priorities.”
2. U.S. EV prices drop 13% year-over-year
EV prices in the U.S. have dropped by about 13% in the last year, according to Kelley Blue Book. The drop “has been led in part by the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, the two most popular EVs in the U.S.,” explained Michelle Lewis at Electrek. However, EVs are still more expensive than “mainstream non-luxury vehicles,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Industry Insights at Cox Automotive.
3. Report: BYD struggles to ramp up overseas EV sales
Chinese EV maker BYD has reportedly hit a speed bump on the road to international expansion. Having dominated the Chinese market and established itself as the top-selling EV maker in the world, BYD set an internal goal of selling 400,000 cars overseas this year. But a global slowdown in EV sales growth has hampered that effort, reported The Wall Street Journal. “As of the end of last year, more than 10,000 BYD passenger cars were waiting in warehouses in Europe,” the Journal added, “and the certificates authorizing them to be sold in the European Union are set to expire soon, meaning it may not be possible to sell them in Europe.” At the same time, quality control issues have been cropping up in some vehicles, and higher prices in Europe are making it more difficult for the company to compete with better-known brands.
4. U.K. emissions hit 145-year low
Greenhouse gas emissions in the UK fell last year to their lowest level since 1879, according to analysis from Carbon Brief. The decline is attributed mainly to a drop in gas demand thanks to higher electricity imports and warmer temperatures. As recently as 2014, the power sector was the UK’s largest source of emissions, but now it has been eclipsed by transportation, buildings, industry, and agriculture. “Transport emissions have barely changed over the past several decades as more efficient cars have been offset by increased traffic,” Carbon Brief explained. Remarkably, coal use in the country is at its lowest level since the 1730s, “when George II was on the throne.” The emissions drop is good news but “with only one coal-fired power station remaining and the power sector overall now likely only the fifth-largest contributor to UK emissions, the country will need to start cutting into gas power and looking to other sectors” to meet net zero by 2050. Meanwhile, the British government today announced a plan to build new gas plants.
5. Seaside town’s $500K new protective sand dune washes away in 3 days
Residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, last week finished building a $500,000 sand dune meant to protect their beachside homes from rising tides and repeated storms. Three days later, the barrier, made of 14,000 tons of sand, washed away when a storm brought historic high tides to the seaside town. “We got hit with three storms – two in January, one now – at the highest astronomical tides possible,” said Rick Rigoli, who oversaw the project. The sea level off the Massachusetts coast has risen by 8 inches since 1950, and is now rising by about 1 inch every 8 years.
THE KICKER
On average, installing a heat pump in your home could cut between 2.5 to 4.4 tons of carbon during the equipment’s lifespan, meaning widespread adoption could result in a 5% to 9% drop in national economy-wide emissions.
The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.
The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA’s new rules, which were finalized in April, would be the government’s first successful effort to regulate climate pollution from the power sector. The electricity industry is the second most-polluting sector in the American economy.
The Obama administration previously tried to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. The Supreme Court blocked those rules from taking effect in 2016, before striking them down completely in 2022.
This time, the agency has written the rules within a framework laid out by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in that ruling. In that now landmark case, the court ruled that the EPA could restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants only by requiring new technology, such as carbon capture equipment, to be installed at the plant itself. The agency couldn’t require utilities to stop burning fossil fuels and build more renewables.
In the near term, whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. During his first term, Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental and climate protections.
Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
“The high court made the right call,” Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Given its rulings in recent years undercutting environmental protections, the refusal of the majority on the Supreme Court to block this vital rule is a victory for common sense.”
Not all the news from the Supreme Court on Wednesday was good for climate advocates, though.
In the same decision that let the new rules stand, the high court’s conservative justices signaled that they might block the rules next year.
“In my view, the applicants have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of their challenges” to the rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a short statement attached to the stay, which was cosigned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But because the rules don’t require utilities to start complying until next June, there was no reason to grant an emergency stay, the two justices added.
Justice Clarence Thomas would have gone further and stepped in to block the rules immediately. Justice Samuel Alito, another reliable conservative vote, did not participate in the deliberations.
That suggests that four justices could be ready to block the rules as soon as next year. They would need only one more vote — from Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to stay the protections from taking effect.
The statement didn’t provide any hints to what Roberts or Barrett are thinking.
Genesee County Economic Development Center / Getty Images / Heatmap
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.
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.
Last week, the city council enacted a 45-day moratorium on permits to construction and operation of battery energy storage systems, or BESS. The moratorium will impact AES Corporation’s Seguro storage project, as well as at least one more pending project, according to staff testimony at the city council meeting on the matter.
But for AES and anyone else who hopes this ends quickly, some bad news: Staff also testified it’ll take much longer than 45 days to prepare a report outlining next steps due to the outstanding government workload – and that’ll just be the idea generation phase of the city’s response. A 10-month moratorium was discussed as a potential next step.
“I don’t think any of us up here are adamantly opposed to battery energy storage systems,” the city’s Republican mayor Dane White said at the meeting. “However, it has to be done the right way.”
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.
The Maine DOT report defends the selection of Sears Island for the project. We previously scooped that this decision has serious legal risks.
Nevertheless, the state believes that it’s a better site than Mack Point, an existing energy logistics port nearby. According to the report, the Mack Point alternative would cost more and “limit any future plans for growth.”
“[It] presents problematic design features that greatly reduce its operational functionality and effectively preclude its use,” the report stated.
This effectively begins the state and federal environmental permitting process for the Sears Island port project. On its end, the state is also preparing a broader draft environmental review.
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.
Activists stormed a community meeting late last week on deciding whether to move forward with Enel Green Power’s 334-megawatts Hope Ridge wind farm. If county planners reject the project, it’ll potentially come with a two-year moratorium on wind. Enel has several operating wind farms in Kansas, including Diamond Vista, which is in the adjacent Marion County. (Marion’s got its own moratorium now, too).
Despite existing generation, Dickinson County is one of the riskier places in the United States for new renewable energy development, according to Heatmap Pro’s analytics, thanks to its demographic, economic, and geographic similarities to other opposed counties.
At the top of the meeting, Enel project developer Jon Beck laid out a laundry list of reasons to build the project including jobs and tax revenue. “This area has been really favorable for a lot of reasons, and that’s why we continue here,” Beck said.
But while some in attendance supported the development, lots of testimony opposing the project stretched the hearing beyond the five-hour mark. (Pray for me, I listened back to the tape).
There’s a follow-up meeting this week. And Enel clearly takes this development seriously, because they sent me a lengthy statement about the opposition to Hope Ridge.
“Throughout this process, we’ve worked to show the Dickinson County community that wind power has been a huge success story for Kansas, bringing billions of dollars in economic impact largely targeted to rural areas,” the statement read. “Our landowners and community partners at Diamond Vista, just down the road, have seen how our project has provided new jobs, better roads, and more local funding over the last six years.”
It continued: “We understand many people in Dickinson County have concerns, but we also have a lot of supporters in the county — including our landowners — who are counting on us to make the case for this project. We hope to earn the support of the Planning Commission this week."
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.
Burning Man will purchase the leases from power company Ormat, which will then in turn help the festival organizations turn that land into a conservation area, according to an announcement of the settlement.
This may effectively kill Ormat’s geothermal exploration project in the area after local officials also revoked a crucial drilling permit.
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.
