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On the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Canada’s new prime minister, and CERAWeek
Current conditions: Firefighters successfully controlled brush fires in Long Island that prompted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to declare a state of emergency • Brisbane, Australia, recorded its wettest day in more than 50 years • Forecasters are keeping an eye on a storm system developing across the central U.S. that could pack a serious punch this week.
The nonprofit Climate United filed a lawsuit over the weekend against the Environmental Protection Agency and Citibank for withholding $7 billion in climate funds awarded as part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. The move escalates a dispute over some $20 billion in grants from the IRA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was designed to help mobilize private capital toward clean energy and climate solutions. President Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has been on a mission to claw back the funds, claiming their distribution was rushed and mismanaged. In its lawsuit, Climate United says it has been unable to access the $7 billion it was awarded, and that the EPA and Citibank have given no explanation for this. It wants a judge to order that the money be released. “We’re not trying to make a political statement here,” Beth Bafford, chief executive of Climate United, toldThe New York Times. “This is about math for homeowners, for truck drivers, for public schools — we know that accessing clean energy saves them money that they can use on far more important things.” The Trump administration has reportedly demanded that the eight organizations tapped to receive the money turn over records to the FBI and appear in federal court later this month.
Canada’s Liberal Party has elected Mark Carney, a net-zero finance advocate, to succeed Justin Trudeau as prime minister. Carney is not a career politician. Instead, he comes from the financial world, having overseen both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and is an evangelist for green investment and a net-zero financial sector. He was the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance in 2019, and “has made clean energy, climate policies and economic prosperity for Canada some of the central facets of his campaign,” CNN reported. If he wins the upcoming general election, Carney will be tasked with navigating President Trump’s tariffs and making key decisions about the future of Canada’s vast natural resources, including fossil fuels and rare minerals.
The U.S. has withdrawn from yet another global climate initiative, this one aimed at helping developing nations recover from natural disasters. The United Nations loss and damage fund was one of the biggest wins to come out of COP28 in 2023, with nearly 200 countries signing on in support. It’s expected to start funding projects this year. About $740 million has been pledged so far, and the U.S. has said it will give about $17.5 million, though it’s unclear if that money will actually be handed over now. “This decision, made by the nation with the largest historical responsibility for climate change, jeopardises vital support for vulnerable countries facing irreversible climate impacts,” said Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African Group of Negotiators.
The energy industry descends on Houston, Texas, this week, for the annual CERAWeek conference. This year’s event, titled “Moving Ahead: Energy Strategies for a Complex World,” will focus on the changing global energy landscape. Key themes include shifting regulations, the turbulent oil and gas market, electrification and power demand, the rise of AI, managing emissions, and the policy outlook for renewables. According toReuters energy columnist Ron Bousso, fossil fuel executives are going into the conference with a case of “Trump buyer’s remorse” as new tariffs and geopolitical policies from the Trump administration have “created turmoil in financial markets and clouded the outlook for the global economy and energy prices.”
Argentina will observe three days of national mourning after 16 people were killed in flash flooding over the weekend triggered by unprecedented rainfall. Nearly a year’s worth of rain – about 16 inches – fell in just eight hours in the port city of Bahia Blanca in the Buenos Aires province. Many people are still missing. Environment official Andrea Dufourg said the event was a clear example of climate change. “Unfortunately this will continue to take place,” Dufourg said. “We have no other option than to prepare cities, educate citizens, and establish effective early warning systems.”
Twenty-one House Republicans have signed a letter urging the GOP to uphold the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits in their budget bill, warning that gutting the credits would “risk sparking an energy crisis in our country, resulting in drastically higher power bills for American families.” That’s three more than signed a similar letter during the last Congress.
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From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.