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On the exaggerated danger of renewables in a blackout
Gas stoves and heating systems are two of the biggest ways that fossil fuels still find their way into our homes. Replacing them with electric stoves and heat pumps would go a long way to reducing our commercial and residential carbon footprint, which the EPA says amounts to 13 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. There’s one little problem: blackouts.
Without battery backup or a generator, everything powered by electricity goes dead when the grid goes down. With major blackouts a rising threat because of worsening wildfires and winter storms, and with our national demand for electricity rising, the plan to “electrify everything” in our homes (and the cars in our garages) may sound worrisome. Wouldn’t it leave us all more vulnerable — unable to heat our homes, cook our food, or drive anywhere when the power goes out?
Don’t be so sure.
At first blush, fossil fuels sound resilient. A fuel like natural gas is just sitting there, waiting to burn and unleash the power within, whether or not the electricity is on. A modern gas stove probably has an electric control panel and ignition, but a person can bypass a modern stove’s electric ignition by using a match to light the burners as long as gas is flowing. However, saying that gas stoves work during an emergency and electric ones won’t isn’t quite true, research scientist Pablo Duenas-Martinez of the MIT Energy Initiative told me.
For one thing, natural gas isn’t disaster-proof. The same kinds of calamities that can disrupt the power grid could also potentially break gas lines or damage the distribution system that moves the fossil fuel to your home. Duenas-Martinez also noted that the substations that compress and distribute gas themselves rely on electricity. So, in the case of widespread power outages, they may not be able to deliver gas to your stove or furnace.
As for that electric stove? Well, we already know how to make backup electricity. Buildings where the power must stay on 24/7, like hospitals and military installations have diesel-burning backup generators. Lots of private homeowners have them, too, and can run the heat pump and stove alongside the lights and the TV.
From a climate perspective, it somewhat defeats the purpose of “electrify everything” if we’re still reliant on dirty generators. Fortunately, cleaner ways to solve this problem are coming. Homes with solar panels could generate their own juice, at least during daylight hours. But improving our ability to store energy will be the game-changer.
Eminent MIT economist Richard Schmalensee told me that the cost of energy storage should fall over the years, especially as the transition to electric vehicles requires building lots and lots of batteries. Big batteries and other avant garde storage solutions will help the electricity system avoid some blackouts in the first place by storing energy when there is ample supply to use later during leaner times.
Better electric storage solutions will come to the house or neighborhood level, Duenas-Martinez said, with some neighborhoods installing backup systems to provide electricity to all their homes during a blackout. Individuals can install backup systems like the Tesla Powerwall, which stores energy from a home’s solar panels to use as backup power later. And a fast-growing number of Americans already have a way to store lots of electricity — the battery in their EV.
Electric cars present a curious case. On the one hand, gasoline-burning vehicles are blackout-proof, so one’s mobility is mostly unaffected by outage, emergency, or calamity (they drive on “guzzoline” in Mad Max, after all, not electrons). When most people have an EV, losing electricity becomes more of a predicament. “Currently, EVs may be more vulnerable than current fossil fueled vehicles because gas stations are very accessible, and the logistics chain for gasoline is well-established,” Duenas-Martinez said.
If an EV's battery is low when a big blackout happens, it may become essentially undriveable, and its voracious energy consumption compared to a toaster or a stove makes refilling the battery from backup systems more difficult. In the case of a sustained power outage, people may have to prioritize what to do with the limited backup power they have — whether they use it for heating and cooling, lights, TV, working on their laptops, doing the laundry, or charging EVs.
Yet EVs will become more resilient as infrastructure gets better, he says. With more chargers available at workplaces, public places, and people’s homes, our EVs will stay mostly charged more often than not. When the power goes out, they’ll have enough energy on hand for a few days’ worth of normal driving.
Plus, what if the car is your backup system? Although the feature is not ubiquitous among today’s models, it is possible to give EVs two-way charging, or the ability to plug in and run other items on the energy in the car’s battery. Ford F-150 Lightning commercials play up the truck’s potential to power an entire home for days at a time. According to researchers like Steven Low at Caltech (full disclosure: it’s also where I work), EV batteries could even be used to balance the grid of the future. While the cars sit parked and unused, they could feed electricity into the system in times of crisis and refill when there’s more to go around.
“The EV battery could help restore service by injecting electricity to the grid,” Duenas-Martinez said. “So, for short blackouts, I would not expect more vulnerability once more chargers are installed.”
When the culture wars came into the kitchen this past January, thanks to the controversy of (maybe) banning gas stoves, the ruckus started over indoor air pollution. But with gas stoves and heaters also a villian in the climate change story, and with electric stoves primed to become much less expensive than their gas counterparts, there’s ample reason to think gas stoves, like gasoline-powered cars, could be on their way out.
When they are, don’t worry — it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to make a hot pot of tea or drive to the grocery store in the middle of a blackout. But it will require a new way to think about home energy.
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Has Plug Power pulled the plug on its upstate New York facility?
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.
The week’s biggest fights around renewable energy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why alarm bells are ringing in the renewable energy ecosystem, plus more policy news
IRA on the mind – The renewable energy ecosystem is starting to really sound alarm bells about the November election and the risks of what they’re calling a “clean energy plan repeal” – e.g. scrapping IRA credits and carbon pollution rules.
No Golden climate bill – However, if Kamala Harris and the Democrats do win in November, I’m bearish on the odds of another big piece of renewables stimulus passing through Congress next term.
Data center moratoriums – Energy demand for tech may be a driver of renewables development across the country, but data centers are starting to face moratoria fights of their own.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, the Solar Energy Industries Association and American Clean Power are rallying behind comprehensive decarb stimulus legislation.
In Louisiana, voters going to the polls will decide whether to increase revenues from offshore energy – including wind – that go to coastal restoration.