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Here’s how much you should worry about the coming solar storm.
You have probably heard by now that there’s a big solar storm on its way toward us. (If not, sign up for Heatmap AM, our daily roundup of climate and energy news.) On Wednesday, the sun started ejecting massive columns of geomagnetic activity out into space in Earth’s direction. That geomagnetism is due to arrive around 11p.m. ET on Friday, triggering huge fluctuations in the Earth’s geomagnetic field.
Those fluctuations can actually generate their own electric current. And too much of that current can wreak havoc on the electrical grid.
The last time we got a heads up like this about a geomagnetic surge of this magnitude was in 2005, when coal generation was close to its peak in the U.S. and renewables were providing less than half the energy they do now. So how does that changing energy mix affect the risk to the grid this time around?
Not too much, said representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization on Friday morning. The other thing that’s happened since 2005 is that we've started paying a lot more attention to space weather — which, despite its name, bears little resemblance to Earth weather — which means grid operators are a lot better prepared to deal with it.
“We’ve been working with the power distribution community over the past decade to help them better understand space weather,” Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist with NOAA, said in a press briefing. “And their engineers have taken that information and used it to build systems that can protect the power lines more rapidly than they could before. So we’ve seen improvements in technology on the grid that get triggered by these events, and then work to protect the different assets.”
Grid operators can also respond in lower tech ways, such as by deferring maintenance or taking systems offline. And to be clear, if there are any grid effects, those will happen just to long-distance transmission lines. Transformers and any wires connecting to your house should be totally fine.
Will the solar storm affect solar panels? According to NOAA, any panels here on Earth should be totally fine since they’re protected by the planet’s atmosphere. Solar panels in space, e.g. those powering satellites, are at more risk depending on the height of their orbit, particularly if they’re outside the reach of the Earth’s magnet field.
The magnetic field will also determine how bad the storm gets here. Earth’s magnetic field points northward. (That’s why compasses work.) If the the solar storm’s magnetic field is oriented in the same direction, its effects will be dampened. “Think of a magnet,” said Shawn Dahl, another of NOAA’s space weather forecasters. “If you take two negative magnets and you try to put them together, they don’t connect, right? Same thing here.” That magnetic orientation can change in the course of a single storm, however, and if suddenly those two poles start drawing together, the effects can intensify.
As of now, NOAA has classified the situation as a severe geomagnetic storm — G4, on a scale that goes up to G5 — of which several have hit Earth since 2005, including one in late March. Those were weaker than the one barreling toward us at the moment, however, although we won’t know how severe this one will be until it passes satellites stationed about a million miles out in space — that is, at most 45 minutes before it hits.
So, is NOAA concerned? “Yeah, we’re a little concerned,” Dahl said, adding that in addition to coordinating with utilities and other operators of critical infrastructure, NOAA is also briefing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. GPS and other satellite-dependent technologies could experience disruptions. Will those be debilitating to society? Probably not.
There’s also one big upside: “The biggest manifestation of space weather is the aurora,” Steenburgh said, a.k.a. the Northern Lights, which could be visible as far south as Alabama. Even if you can’t see anything with the naked eye, it’s worth pointing your cell phone at the sky and snapping a pic, said Brent Gordon, another NOAA space scientist.
“Cell phones are much better than our eyes and capturing light,” Gordon explained. “Just just go out your back door and take a picture with a newer cellphone and you'd be amazed at what is what you see in that picture versus what you see with your eyes.”
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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, which 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.
In the closing minutes of the first presidential debate tonight, Donald Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris took an odd, highly specific, and highly Teutonic turn. It might not have made sense to many viewers, but it fit into the overall debate’s unusually substantive focus on energy policy.
“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” he said, addressing Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel. We’re not gonna do — things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.”
“Germany tried that and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” he continued. “We’re not ready for it.”
What is he talking about? Let’s start by stipulating that Harris has renounced her previous support for banning fracking. During the debate, she bragged that the United States has hit an all-time high for oil and gas production during her vice presidency.
But why bring Germany into it? At the risk of sane-washing the former president, Trump appears to be referencing what German politicians call the Energiewiende, or energy turnaround. Since 2010, Germany has sought to transition from its largest historic energy sources, including coal and nuclear energy, to renewables and hydropower.
The Energiewiende is often discussed inside and outside of Germany as a climate policy, and it has helped achieve global climate goals by, say, helping to push down the global price of solar panels. But as an observant reader might have already noticed, its goals are not entirely emissions-related: Its leaders have also hoped to use the Energiewiende to phase out nuclear power, which is unpopular in Germany but which does not produce carbon emissions.
The transition has accomplished some of its goals: The country says that it is on target to meet its 2030 climate targets. But it ran into trouble after Russia invaded Ukraine, because Germany obtained more than half of its natural gas, and much of its oil and coal besides, from Russia. Germany turned back on some of its nuclear plants — it has since shut them off again — and increased its coal consumption. It also began importing fossil fuels from other countries.
In order to shore up its energy supply, Germany is also planning to build 10 gigawatts of new natural gas plants by 2030, although it says that these facilities will be “hydrogen ready,” meaning that they could theoretically run on the zero-carbon fuel hydrogen. German automakers, who have lagged at building electric vehicles, have also pushed for policies that support “e-fuels,” or low-carbon liquid fuels. These fuels would — again, theoretically — allow German firms to keep building internal combustion engines.
So perhaps that’s not exactly what Trump said, to put it mildly — but it is true that to cope with the Ukraine war and the loss of nuclear power, Germany has had to fall back on fossil fuels. Of course, at the same time, more than 30% of German electricity now comes from wind and solar energy. In other words, in Germany, renewables are just another kind of “normal energy plant.”
Hunter Biden also made an appearance in Trump’s answer to the debate’s one climate question.
Well, it happened — over an hour into the debate, but it happened: the presidential candidates were asked directly about climate change. ABC News anchor Linsey Davis put the question to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and their respective answers were both surprising and totally not.
Harris responded to the question by laying out the successes of Biden’s energy policy and in particular, the Inflation Reduction Act (though she didn’tmention it by name). “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy,” Harris noted.
The vice president immediately followed this up, however, by pointing out that gas production has also increased to “historic levels,” under the Biden-Harris administration. This framing, highlighting an all-of-the-above approach to energy, is consistent with Harris’s comments earlier in the debate, whenshe claimed to support fracking and investing in “diverse sources of energy.” Harris went on to reiterate the biggest wins of the Inflation Reduction Act, namely, “800,000 new manufacturing jobs,” and shouted out her endorsement from the United Auto Workers and its President Shawn Fain.
Trump, who earlier in the debate called himself “a big fan of solar” before questioning the amount of land it takes up, started off his response by once again claiming that the Biden-Harris administration is building Chinese-owned EV plants in Mexico (they are not). Then Trump veered completely off topic and rounded out his answer by ranting about Biden (both Joe and Hunter). “You know, Biden doesn’t go after people because, supposedly, China paid him millions of dollars,” Trump noted. “He’s afraid to do it between him and his son, they get all this money from Ukraine.”
Trump’s answer included no reference to climate or clean energy — but it did include a shout out to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” so there’s that.