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On the return of geoengineering, climate lawsuits, and a cheaper EV.
Current conditions: Battered Midwest in for more bad weather this weekend • Tornadoes keep hitting the Great Plains • A heat wave in New Delhi that pushed temperatures above 116 degrees Fahrenheit on Friday is expected to last several more days.
Nineteen Republican-led states are asking the Supreme Court to stop Democrat-led states from trying to force oil and gas companies to pay for the impacts of climate change. Rhode Island in 2018 became the first state to sue major oil companies for climate damages and has since been joined by California, Connecticut, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The states pursuing legal action against oil companies are trying to “dictate the future of the American energy industry,” the Republican attorneys general argued in a motion filed this week, “not by influencing federal legislation or by petitioning federal agencies, but by imposing ruinous liability and coercive remedies on energy companies” through the court system.
A month after ordering researchers to stop a cloud brightening experiment due to health and environmental concerns, officials in Alameda, California, determined that the experiment poses no measurable risk to people or wildlife. They found that the saltwater solution being sprayed into air is similar to saltwater, a naturally occurring aerosol. Alameda’s city council plans to reconsider the experiment based on officials’ findings early next month.
The experiment is one of the first tests of a form of geoengineering intended to reflect more solar energy back into space. Sarah J. Doherty, director of the Marine Cloud Brightening Program at the University of Washington, told The New York Times that the report “supports our own evaluation that this is a safe, publicly accessible way to further research on aerosols in the atmosphere.”
The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the Biden administration over its new standards for pollution from coal-fired power plants. The rule, which the EPA finalized last month, curtails coal plants’ discharges of heavy metals into water sources. But it includes exceptions for plants that are slated to retire by 2034. The Center for Biological Diversity called this an “unacceptable” loophole, emphasizing the risks that heavy metal pollution pose to communities and ecosystems. Brett Hartl, the conservation group’s government affairs director, said in a statement that the rule gives the coal industry “a free pass to dump millions of pounds of toxic pollution into this nation’s rivers for another 10 years.”
On Thursday, the Korean automaker Kia revealed the EV3, a small crossover that will start in the $30,000s when it comes to America next year or the year after. While slower than some of its rivals — Kia says it will go 0-60 miles per hour in 7.5 seconds — the EV3 will boast a range of 372 miles, “which blows away most current offerings, especially in that price range,” Andrew Moseman writes at Heatmap. The EV3 is the latest piece of the grand plan put together by Kia (and its owner, Hyundai) to offer an electric crossover at every price point — and a sign that more entry-level EVs might be coming over the horizon.
General Sherman, the world’s largest tree, passed a recent health check by researchers looking for evidence of damage by bark beetles. Both giant sequoias and bark beetles are native to California’s Sierra Nevada range, but the mounting pressures of climate change, including heat, drought, and fire, are weakening the sequoias and leaving them vulnerable to dying from bark beetle infestations. “The most significant threat to giant sequoias is climate-driven wildfires,” Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration at Save the Redwoods League, told The Associated Press. “But we certainly don’t want to be caught by surprise by a new threat, which is why we’re studying these beetles now.”
Researchers don’t fully understand how climate change is impacting air travel, but evidence suggests that instability in the jet stream may be contributing to the rise in clear-air turbulence.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.