Mother Earth is getting no respect in WV or at the Supreme Court

And, we have news about air quality in Allegheny County, and a Pittsburgh visit by the U.S. Energy Secretary, who said the fight against climate change is the “war of our lifetimes.”

Now we are closer to the ‘climate cliff’ if not in a climate emergency! In a 6-3 majority decision, the Supreme Court struck down a now-defunct rule by the Obama EPA that would have shifted electricity generation away from coal to cleaner natural gas, wind and solar. “A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority.

Environmental groups, state officials, the coal industry and lawyers weigh in:

David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment: “The Supreme Court just made the monumental task of cleaning up our air and reducing climate-warming pollution much, much harder. We have limited time to reign in our climate pollution, before we fall off a climate cliff from which the planet cannot come back.”

Rachel Gleason, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance: “Coal’s a global commodity. So it really has ebbs and flows depending on what is happening globally. Because of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, there’s a global energy crisis…and right now, [Europe is] turning their coal plants back on, so I think these kinds of overreaching policy decisions are not meant for bureaucratic agencies that change every four or eight years.”

Alex Bomstein, director of litigation for Clean Air Council: He said these types of “major questions” arguments could now be pushed more often. “Whether the Pennsylvania courts decide to take those parties up on that and try to adopt federal law as Pennsylvania law is a question I don’t know the answer to and I think we’ll be watching.”

Rob Altenburg, director for energy and climate for PennFuture: “We don’t know what the next step is going to be, but we do know that we need to get to net-zero by 2050. We have an Environmental Rights Amendment…and the Air Pollution Control Act…so this decision isn’t applicable to the state.”

John Dernbach, director of the Environmental Law and Sustainability Center at Widener University Commonwealth Law School: He said it’s “distressing” that the court took up the case when it didn’t have to, as a vehicle for limiting executive power. He doesn’t see the ruling affecting the Wolf Administration’s attempt to regulate CO2 because Pennsylvania has its own law governing air pollution that gives the state DEP authority, as well as an Environmental Rights Amendment.

Ramez Ziadeh, Acting Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection: “The ruling undercuts good-faith efforts to fight climate change, but that does not mean we will stop fighting.”

A major effort of the Wolf administration has been joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program with 11 other states to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. But Pennsylvania’s participation in RGGI hinges on the state’s next governor. Republican nominee Doug Mastriano has promised to remove the state from RGGI on his first day, if elected, while Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro has expressed doubts about RGGI.

THE ALLEGHENY FRONT, 67 BEDFORD SQUARE, PITTSBURGH, PA 15203

Contact Email Address ~ info@alleghenyfront.org

Building pipelines is like burying our heads in the sand?

From an Article by Ivy Main, Power for the People VA, November 19, 2021

This past Election Day was a tough day for climate advocates.

After two years of historic progress that included passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), the centerpiece of the Virginia Commonwealth’s plan to decarbonize the electric sector by 2050, voters handed a narrow victory to its critics. Republicans will take over as governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and, barring any surprises in two recounts, the House of Delegates.

During the campaign, former Carlyle Group CEO Glenn Youngkin criticized the VCEA for raising rates and putting “our entire energy grid at risk.” While largely supportive of solar and wind (especially offshore wind, which he “wholly supports”), Youngkin also argued for more natural gas to feed “the rip-roaring economy that I’m going to build.” This is, essentially, the old “all of the above” strategy we hoped had been buried for good, coupled with unfounded fear-mongering about power outages.

On the bright side, Governor-elect Youngkin has acknowledged that climate change is real and is causing damage here in Virginia. At the same time, he supposedly told a Norfolk State University audience in October that he didn’t know what is causing climate change. It seems likely this was a clumsy lie prompted by political expedience, rather than a reflection of actual ignorance. Two years ago Youngkin touted Carlyle Group’s record as “the first major private investment firm to operate on a carbon-neutral basis.” That’s not something you do just to be on trend.

So yes, Youngkin knows that increasing greenhouse gas emissions are driving the warming of the planet, and at Carlyle he was willing to do something about it. But now that he’s a politician, Youngkin is embracing natural gas in a way that suggests he’d rather ignore the truth about methane than take a stance unpopular in his party. Heck, for all we know, he may now even subscribe to the plan recently laid out by U.S. Senate Republicans to address climate change by increasing natural gas production and exports.

The fact that we have no idea where Youngkin stands on the need for climate solutions is only one part of the problem facing climate activists in Virginia’s upcoming legislative session. The bigger problem is that a lot of our Republican legislators are outright hostile to climate science and Virginia’s framework for the energy transition. These folks are loaded for bear, and they will use their narrow win to flood the House with bills aimed at rolling back the energy transition.

In addition to VCEA, the Republican hit list includes the Clean Energy and Community Preparedness Act, which directed Virginia to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI); the Clean Car Standard, which promotes sales of electric vehicles; and the Commonwealth Clean Energy Policy, which makes the transition to a net-zero-energy economy official state policy.

Whether these bills will pass the House is less certain, given the benefits these laws are already delivering. The VCEA spurred “incredible growth” in solar installations, making Virginia fourth in the nation for new solar generation in 2020, and the world’s biggest offshore wind blade manufacturer just announced plans for a facility in Portsmouth, Virginia. Does anyone really want to stop that momentum? Tens of millions of dollars are already flowing to climate adaptation projects in coastal areas thanks to RGGI’s carbon allowance auctions. Pulling the plug on that cash flow would hurt Republicans representing the area.

Notwithstanding the rhetoric, the VCEA is good for business and consumers. Ratepayers will save money through the mandated closure of uneconomic coal, oil and biomass plants, and by the removal of barriers to distributed renewable energy generation. Solar’s low cost positions it to overtake fossil fuels as the go-to generation source for utilities, but the VCEA creates the market certainty that attracts investment. And offshore wind — the most expensive part of the VCEA, but the part Youngkin apparently likes — is also popular on both sides of the aisle as an engine of investment and job creation.

That doesn’t mean anti-VCEA bills won’t pass the House; being bad policy is never enough to kill legislation, or even stop people who ought to know better from voting for it. In 2019, an anti-RGGI bill from Del. Charles Poindexter (R-Franklin) passed both the House and Senate on party-line votes. It was prevented from taking effect only thanks to a veto from Governor Northam. Today, I can count very few House Republicans who won’t toe the same party line.

With Democrats still in charge of the Senate, Youngkin isn’t likely to find a RGGI or VCEA repeal on his desk. Creating an energy transition framework was one of the Democrats’ biggest successes in the past two years, and protecting that success will be a party priority.

But there are many ways Republicans can undercut climate action. They might attract just enough Democratic votes with bills that, for example, grant exemptions for powerful industries that have friends among Senate Democrats. They could also use the budget process to undermine the transition by starving agencies and grant programs of funding.

If politics doesn’t completely get in the way, though, there should be room for consensus on some new areas of progress. Highly efficient schools with solar roofs save money for taxpayers; electric school buses are good for children’s health; solar on abandoned mine sites promise employment to residents of Southwest Virginia.

Beyond the General Assembly, executive agencies have had the job of implementing all the various parts of the RGGI program and the VCEA. And the agencies, of course, answer to the governor. The Department of Environmental Quality will have signed off — or not — on the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s permits before Younkin takes office, but after that, we can expect the VA DEQ to return to being the easy-permitting, lax-enforcing agency it was of old.

As for the Department of Energy, that agency has been going gangbusters turning Virginia into a clean energy leader and promoting new models like brownfields redevelopment and clean energy financing. Hopefully those efforts offer so much in the way of economic opportunities that a businessman like Youngkin will want them to continue.

But that, like so much else, remains to be seen.

Regional Initiatives Across the United States

From an Article by Sarah Vogelsong, Virginia Mercury, March 17, 2021

The $43 million was “in the state’s hot little hands,” Mike Dowd told the group. So what next?

That was the question facing not only Mike Dowd, director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s Air Division, but also a collection of developers, state officials and environmental and low-income advocacy groups who had gathered over Zoom.

All were focused on the best uses of that $43 million in carbon money, the first round of funds Virginia had received through its participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an 11-state agreement that puts a price on the carbon emissions that are driving climate change, requires power plants to pay that price and then channels the proceeds back to the states.

Most of that funding will eventually be paid for by customers of the state’s electric utilities, which are allowed under state law to pass on the costs of carbon allowances to customers, with no extra returns for investors. State officials had conservatively projected annual proceeds from RGGI’s carbon auctions to be in the range of $106 to $109 million. But with allowances trading at $7.60 per short ton of emissions at this March’s quarterly auction, actual revenues now look to be much higher, amounting to perhaps as much as $174 million annually if prices hold.

What to do with that major new stream of income — especially in a pandemic year when purses are tight — has been the preoccupation of dozens of Virginia officials this winter.

The law passed by the General Assembly in 2020 authorizing participation in RGGI spells out certain high-level priorities for the funds: 50 percent for low-income energy efficiency programs, 45 percent for a new Community Flood Preparedness Fund to assist communities affected by recurrent flooding and sea level rise, 3 percent for DEQ to oversee Virginia’s participation in RGGI and carry out statewide climate change planning and the remainder for other administrative work.

But between those goals and projects on the ground lies a lot of space. Should the state be creating new programs or beefing up existing ones? Should certain housing types or certain geographic areas get priority — particularly given new equity commitments designed to ensure that benefits are felt across the board?

“There’s not a whole lot of direction there, so I think it’s really important … to think about the spirit of the legislation and try to address some of the underlying causes,” said Dawone Robinson, director of an energy affordability program run by the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of one of the advisory boards Virginia convened to decide how to spend its carbon dollars.

Compounding the challenge has been time constraints: Virginia’s fiscal year ends on June 30. With the first auction funds arriving this March, agencies have only a few short months to spend them. While RGGI funds are nonreverting, meaning agencies won’t lose them at the end of the fiscal year, most are eager to get the funds out of the door immediately.

“If we’d had our druthers, we would have been working on this last year,” said Carmen Bingham of the Virginia Poverty Law Center, who is also serving on the same advisory board as Robinson. Between slowdowns due to COVID-19 and the RGGI law not going into effect until July 1, however, the agencies that will receive the bulk of the carbon funds — the Department of Housing and Community Development, which will oversee the low-income energy efficiency funds, and the Department of Conservation and Recreation, which will oversee the Flood Preparedness Fund — have been forced to move quickly to narrow down their priorities.

“We’re in this very weird place of having to work frantically in order to come up with how do we spend this first round of money,” said Bingham. But, she added, “that’s the hand we’re dealt and the cards we’ve got to play.”

Low-income energy efficiency in Virginia

From the beginning, Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration zeroed in on the possibilities the funds earmarked under the RGGI law for low-income energy efficiency offered for affordable housing.

Low-income tenants ideally would be able to rent “more highly efficient properties” as a result of RGGI funding, then-Deputy Secretary of Commerce and Trade Angela Navarro said during a webinar last July. An administration memo similarly identified “deeper levels of energy efficiency” in affordable housing and upgrades to public housing as priorities.

Advocates, however, pointed in a different direction: weatherization, a set of improvements to a building that cut down on energy waste and consequently tend to lower electric bills.

The federal government has funded weatherization programs for low-income households since the 1970s, but federal program guidelines strictly define what falls under the weatherization umbrella. Improvements like roof or wall repairs that are deemed health and safety issues don’t qualify, even if they are fixes that have to occur before weatherization can be done. When weatherization providers encounter these issues, they have to walk away, creating what’s called a “deferral.”

In Virginia, those number in the hundreds: Janaka Casper, CEO of Community Housing Partners, the state’s largest weatherization provider, said that as of 2019 his organization had recorded 525 deferrals.

In practice, that has meant that “the homes that are most in need of weatherization services can’t be worked on,” said Chelsea Harnish, executive director of the Virginia Energy Efficiency Council. “This is housing stock that is in desperate need. This could be a hole in the roof. It could be a hole in the floor. To me that directly goes to energy efficiency.”

To many advocates, who have been asked by the Department of Housing and Community Development how its portion of the RGGI money — which this fiscal year will amount to $21.7 million — should be spent, the deferrals were a top priority. Not only did they represent an identified need, but they offered the opportunity to address some of the commonwealth’s most vulnerable populations, including historically economically disadvantaged and minority communities.

“From a sheer climate perspective, it has often been the preferred route to tackle the low-hanging fruit,” said Robinson. “That’s not low-income housing. That’s not rental housing.”

But policymakers must “look at the totality of benefits that can be achieved,” he insisted. “If you value equity, what is the cost of achieving racial equity? If you value increasing indoor air quality, what is the value of human health?” he asked. “These are invaluable measures that aren’t addressed and aren’t calculated in a traditional cost-benefit (analysis).”

As the Department of Housing and Community Development’s RGGI advisory group met throughout the winter, weatherization slowly slid onto the priority list. This Monday, the group signed off on a recommendation for how this year’s carbon funds should be spent: 60 percent on weatherization and 40 percent on efforts to increase energy efficiency for affordable housing through the state’s Affordable and Special Needs Housing Program.

Advocates like Bingham said the split bridged the state’s immediate needs and longer-term ones. Weatherization “has that immediate impact that we can actually see, whereas housing projects are going to take awhile. They’re not going to be as quick to get a benefit right away,” she said.

…. Part 2 scheduled to appear next ……
.

Planning for much more solar & wind power

From a Report by Ivy Main, Power for the People VA, April 3, 2020

Virginia joins RGGI, less CO2 emissions

Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality has already written the regulations that call for Virginia power plants to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2030. The mechanism for achieving this involves Virginia trading with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a regional carbon cap and trade market.

The regulations have been on hold as the result of a budget amendment passed last year, when Republicans still ruled the General Assembly. After July 1, DEQ will be able to implement the regulations, with the commonwealth participating in carbon allowance auctions as early as the last quarter of this year or the first quarter of 2021.

In addition to joining RGGI, the Clean Energy and Community Flood Preparedness Act also allows the commonwealth to earn money from the allowance auctions. The Department of Housing and Community Development will spend 50 percent of auction proceeds on “low-income efficiency programs, including programs for eligible housing developments.”

The Department of Conservation and Recreation will get 45 percent of the auction proceeds to fund flood preparedness and climate change planning and mitigation through the Virginia Community Flood Preparedness Fund. The last 5 percent of proceeds will cover administrative costs, including those for administering the auctions.

Energy efficiency savings become mandatory, not just decorations

Two years ago, the Grid Transformation and Security Act required Dominion and Appalachian Power to propose more than a billion dollars in energy efficiency spending over 10 years, but the law didn’t say the programs had to actually be effective in lowering electricity demand.

This year that changed. For the first time, Virginia will have an energy efficiency resource standard (EERS) requiring Dominion to achieve a total of 5 percent electricity savings by 2025 (using 2019 as the baseline); APCo must achieve a total of 2 percent savings. The SCC is charged with setting new targets after 2025. At least 15 percent of the costs must go to programs benefiting low-income, elderly or disabled individuals, or veterans.

The EERS comes on top of the low-income energy efficiency spending funded by RGGI auctions.

Dominion and Appalachian Power ramp up renewables and energy storage

The Clean Economy Act requires Dominion to build 16,100 megawatts of onshore wind and solar energy, and APCo to build 600 megawatts. The law also contains one of the strongest energy storage mandates in the country: 2,700 MW for Dominion, 400 MW for Appalachian Power.

Beginning in 2020, Dominion and Appalachian must submit annual plans to the SCC for new wind, solar and storage resources. We’ll have a first look at Dominion’s plans just a month from now: the SCC has told the company to take account of the Clean Economy Act and other new laws when it files its 2020 Integrated Resource Plan on May 1.

The legislation provides a strangely long lead time before the utilities must request approval of specific projects: by the end of 2023 for APCo (the first 200 MW) or 2024 for Dominion (the first 3,000 MW). But the build-out then becomes rapid, and the utilities must issue requests for proposals on at least an annual basis.

In addition to the solar and land-based wind, Dominion now has the green light for up to 3,000 MW of offshore wind from the project it is developing off Virginia Beach, and which it plans to bring online beginning in 2024. All told, the Clean Economy Act proclaims up to 5,200 MW of offshore wind by 2034 to be in the public interest.

###########################

See also: Virginia lawmakers agreed to join a regional carbon market. Here’s what happens next. – Virginia Mercury, Sarah Vogelsong, April 14, 2020

“By joining RGGI, Virginia will take part in a proven, market-based program for reducing carbon pollution in a manner that protects consumers,” Northam said in a statement Sunday. “I am proposing important refinements and I look forward to signing it into law soon.”

Clearing these political hurdles, though, is only the beginning of the administration’s work. Virginia will become a full participant in RGGI starting Jan. 1. Here’s what will happen between now and then.

Proposed 340 MW Charles City Solar Project would need no allowances

From an Article by Sarah Vogelsong, Virginia Mercury, February 27, 2020

As Democrats bring home one of their top-line energy goals of the session, joining Virginia with the cap-and-trade Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the caucus is holding firm against one company’s efforts to bring down its compliance costs even as it’s quietly cleared the way for two power producers to pay less.

In committee and on chamber floors, Democrats have repeatedly voted down bill amendments that would allow LS Power, the company that owns the Doswell Energy Center in Hanover County, to pay less for the carbon allowances it will have to purchase at auction from the state under RGGI during a five-year transition period.

At the same time, however, Democratic senators have largely turned a blind eye toward exceptions that would be carved out for two as yet unbuilt natural gas plants in Charles City County. Those carveouts, which are outlined in a bill sponsored by Sen. Lionell Spruill, D-Chesapeake, passed the Senate and will be taken up by the House Labor and Commerce Committee Thursday afternoon.

But while Democrats in the General Assembly have shown mixed concern for the impacts RGGI compliance will have on business, Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration has vigorously opposed any dilution of the revenues the state is set to receive under RGGI.

“Giving one company a bailout to the tune of tens of millions of dollars just isn’t something that we think is appropriate,” Secretary of Natural Resources Matt Strickler told the House Labor and Commerce Committee Feb. 20.

Transitioning business or ‘blowing a hole’ in state revenues?

LS Power, a major electric generation, transmission and distribution company with tens of billions in financing, has proved a thorn in the administration’s side this session. The company has sought to insert a provision into the RGGI legislation Democrats are pushing to cap the costs they would have to pay as the state enters the carbon market.

Under RGGI, Virginia will be subject to a carbon emissions cap that declines each year. Carbon emitters will be required to purchase annual carbon allowances at a state-run auction, with 97 percent of revenues — estimated by the state to be between $104 and $109 million annually but by some industry analysts using SCC estimates to be as high as $163 million — going to flood preparedness and energy efficiency programs. (The remaining 3 percent would cover administrative costs.)

The premise of RGGI is straightforward: put a price on emissions and companies looking toward their bottom line will reduce them.

States that participate in the cap-and-trade market have endorsed that framework, accepting carbon prices as a feature, not a bug, of the system. But they have struggled to determine exactly how pre-existing contracts — those signed by emitters prior to the enactment of carbon pricing — should be handled.

Of the 10 states that participate in RGGI today, four have made some provision for such contracts. New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Connecticut have all at different times taken steps to protect power generators locked into long-term power contracts from absorbing large costs in the remaining years of their contracts.

LS Power has argued that Virginia should do the same, contending it stands to lose about $42 million over the next five years because of four contracts it signed in 2016 and 2017. The generator has proposed that Virginia set up a reserve account from which eligible companies could purchase carbon allowances at 25 percent of the auction price for the next five years until their contracts expire. That, the company says, could save it some $32 million over the next five years.

Bea Gonzalez, a lobbyist for LS Power, contended that such an accommodation is a matter of fairness, particularly because a 2017 carbon rule developed by the VA Department of Environmental Quality included a provision that would have covered the company’s compliance costs related to its pre-existing contracts. “We’re asking for the allowances that we thought were contemplated in the work group,” Gonzalez told a Senate panel Feb. 18. “I’m willing to take anything at this point.”

Republicans have been sympathetic to the company’s stance, with Sen. Ryan McDougle, R-Hanover, arguing that LS Power’s recent $100 million investment in Hanover justifies cost reduction. “We have encouraged companies to come and locate in Virginia, build, spend their money,” he said in the Senate Feb. 11. “This is a very limited example of how the policy we are changing, relatively dramatically, is going to be very expensive to an entity.”

Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico, agreed. “These contracts were entered into with a stable business environment with the expectation that they knew what the costs relevant to that investment would be,” she said. “By changing code this year, we are changing the game rules for them without the ability for them to renegotiate their contracts.”

But Democrats have resisted the measure, saying the state should not lose revenue because of a company’s lack of foresight, and that the losses would “blow a hole” in the funding Virginia has for coastal resiliency and energy efficiency.

Carbon regulations have been discussed for more than 15 years, legislators and the administration have argued. RGGI held its first allowance auction in 2008, and in June 2016, then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe issued an executive order calling on the state to begin studying carbon reductions, noting that “electric companies are including carbon regulation projections in their long-term plans.” LS Power participated in an early work group and began including provisions to recover RGGI-related costs in its contracts in December 2018.

“This is a very large, very sophisticated company with a plethora of lawyers and sophisticated utility regulation folks who made a bad decision,” Democratic Sen. Lynwood Lewis of Accomack, the RGGI bill’s Senate patron, told the chamber Feb. 11. “Nobody was unaware that this commonwealth was discussing the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.”

The bill’s House patron, Majority Leader Charniele Herring of Alexandria, took a similar line in the Senate Appropriations Committee Tuesday. “I think unfortunately the company made an error,” she said. “I don’t think Virginians should be in the spot of rescuing the company and losing some funds that could help us with resilience of our shores.”