Labor programs train workers for wind turbine energy projects

From an Article & Web Site of OffshoreWindAlliance.org, August 3, 2022

Annapolis, MD – Ørsted, the U.S. leader in offshore wind and developer of Skipjack Wind in Maryland, today commended the U.S. Department of Commerce and State of Maryland for a $22.9 million federal investment in the state’s offshore wind workforce training and pledged to work closely with State leaders to prepare Maryland residents for its offshore wind workforce. The State of Maryland, through the Maryland Department of Labor, will utilize the funds to create Maryland Works for Wind, a regional consortium to establish the state as a key hub for offshore wind training, fabrication, and employment.

Ørsted will invest nearly $735 million in Maryland and create thousands of local jobs during Skipjack Wind’s development and operation. As part of this effort, Ørsted is committing $10 million to STEM education and workforce development programs in Maryland. These programs will convene Maryland colleges, universities, community colleges, school systems, registered apprenticeship programs, pre-apprenticeship programs and community organizations to ensure the industry’s immense opportunities are available equitably and sustainably.

“Ørsted is proud to be making significant commitments to develop supply chain, manufacturing, and operations capabilities across Maryland as we develop Skipjack Wind,” said David Hardy, CEO of Ørsted Offshore North America. “The Maryland Works for Wind initiative positions the state to build a pipeline of skilled talent to support Skipjack Wind’s development and other projects in the U.S. and globally. Ørsted is excited to work with the Maryland Department of Labor and its partners to ensure all Marylanders have access to the skills needed to secure good-paying jobs in offshore wind.”

Building on Ørsted’s landmark agreement with the North American Building Trades Union, and the Baltimore – D.C. Metro Building and Construction Trades Council, Ørsted is committed to working in partnership with organized labor to build Skipjack Wind’s onshore and offshore construction, and ensure those who are building this clean energy infrastructure are paid decent wages, work in a safe environment, and have a voice on the job.

Ørsted’s labor agreements have set the bar for working conditions and equity in the offshore wind industry, and will inject new dollars in middle-class wages into the American economy, create apprenticeship and career opportunities for communities most impacted by environmental injustice, and ensure projects will be built with the safest and best-trained workers in America. The Maryland Works for Wind initiative will be critical in helping to reach these goals.

Ørsted is also partnering with Tradepoint Atlantic to build Maryland’s first offshore wind staging center. Ørsted invested $13.2 million in port infrastructure upgrades for handling offshore wind components such as nacelles, blades, and towers, and will develop 50 additional acres for the laydown, storage, and assembly of components. Ørsted will also enable the development of a subsea array cable and turbine tower manufacturing facilities in Maryland to serve offshore wind projects in the U.S. and globally, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in local investment and creating hundreds of local jobs.

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Ørsted entered into a $70 million supply agreement to establish Maryland’s first offshore wind steel fabrication center at Crystal Steel Fabricators and will construct Maryland’s first zero-emissions operations and maintenance facility in west Ocean City.

About Skipjack Wind

Skipjack Wind is a 966-megawatt offshore wind project under development off the Maryland-Delaware coast. The project will create nearly 1,400 jobs in the Delmarva region, power approximately 300,000 homes in the region with clean energy, and enable more than $500 million in economic investment. Learn more at www.skipjackwind.com.

About Ørsted Offshore North America

The Ørsted vision is a world that runs entirely on green energy. Four years in a row, Ørsted earned recognition as the world’s most sustainable energy company by Corporate Knights, including for 2022. The company is a global clean energy leader and has the largest portfolio of offshore wind energy in the world.

In the United States, Ørsted operates the Block Island Wind Farm, America’s first offshore wind farm, and constructed the two-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project – the first turbines to be installed in federal waters. Ørsted has approximately 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy in development in five states and across seven projects. Ørsted Offshore’s North American business is jointly headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island and employs approximately 250 people. To learn more visit us.orsted.com or follow on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (@OrstedUS).

There is so much more to the “climate crisis” than public opinion, but here it is ...

From the Article of BeyondKona, Hawaii, June 25, 2022

At the end of the first full Supreme Court term with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in place, liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he was amazed — and not in a particularly good way — what President George W. Bush’s nominees to the bench had accomplished in such little time.

“It is not often that so few have so quickly changed so much,” Breyer said in June 2007.

But that was nothing compared to this week as three Trump-appointed justices, joined their other Republican-majority court justices in firing off two significant decisions in rapid succession. First, a Second Amendment gun rights ruling which flies in the face of rising public concerns over escalating national gun violence now targeting the most innocent of society; children. The Court majority’s second decision was another political win and a shock to many women, a second coming to others in the form of the most significant social ruling in modern times; overturning protections granted women by Roe v. Wade for the nearly 50 years which guaranteed a woman’s fundamental right to health care and abortion.

As significant as these two recent court decisions represent, what’s ahead for this GOP-controlled court will soon affect every American regardless of their sex, race, income, or political party — an environmental climate case now being decided by the Supreme Court. As in the case of the legal dismemberment of Roe v. Wade, this case is the product of a coordinated multiyear strategy led by Republican Attorneys General.

Within days, the Republican majority on the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision that could severely limit the federal government’s authority to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants — pollution found to dangerously heat the planet’s climate.

Fossil Fuel Polluters Retaliate

On the front lines of this emerging battle is the case of West Virginia v. EPA, is the result of a coordinated, multi-decade strategy led by Republican Attorneys General, conservative legal activists, and their funders with ties to the oil and coal industries.

The polluter attack strategy is fairly straight forward; use the judicial system to rewrite environmental laws, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.

Coming up through the federal courts are more and more climate cases and headed to Supreme Court, some featuring novel legal arguments, each carefully selected for its potential to block the government’s ability to regulate industries and businesses that produce greenhouse gases. These legal strategies are becoming more and more sophisticated with time and money.

The plaintiffs seek to hem in what they call the “administrative state”, the E.P.A. and other federal agencies who set rules and enforce regulations that affect industrial sectors responsible for the majority of environmental crimes and offenses in which newer regulations are designed to rein in, e.g., global warming emissions, toxic air and water pollution violations, etc.

Congress has barely addressed the issue of climate change. Instead, for decades it has delegated authority to the EPA and other agencies because it lacks the political will, and equally important, the expertise possessed by the specialists who write complicated rules and regulations and who can respond quickly to changing science – a long standing practice now embedded in today’s Capitol Hill gridlock.

Follow the Money, Big Time

The Federalist Society is one of many money sources engaged in attacks on Federal environmental and climate protections. The Society is funded by the likes of Koch Industries, which has long fought and funded climate action roadblocks; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, created by the heirs to the Mellon oil, aluminum and banking fortune; and Chevron, the oil giant and plaintiff in the case that created the so-called “Chevron defense”. After a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, that doctrine holds that courts must defer to reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes by federal agencies on the theory that agencies have more expertise than judges and are more accountable to voters. “Judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political branch of the government,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his opinion for a unanimous court ruling.

The forthcoming case; West Virginia v. E.P.A., No. 20–1530 on the court docket, is notable for the tangle of connections between the plaintiffs and the Supreme Court justices who will decide their case.

The Republican plaintiffs share many of the same donors behind efforts to nominate and confirm five of the Republicans on the bench — John G. Roberts, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

“It’s a pincer move,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of the progressive watchdog group True North Research and a former senior Justice Department official. “They are teeing up the attorneys to bring the litigation before the same judges that they handpicked.”

The pattern is repeated in other climate cases filed by the Republican AG’s now advancing through the lower courts: The plaintiffs are supported by the same network of conservative donors who helped former President Donald J. Trump place more than 200 federal judges, many now in position to rule on the climate cases in the coming year.

At least two of the cases feature an unusual approach that demonstrates the aggressive nature of the legal campaign. In those suits, the plaintiffs are challenging regulations or policies that don’t yet exist. They seek to pre-empt efforts by President Biden to deliver on his promise to pivot the country away from fossil fuels, while at the same time aiming to prevent a future president from trying anything similar.

The Stakes for Climate Cases ~ Limitations on action in the United States against global warming could doom global efforts to avert the worst climate disruptions.

Victory for the plaintiffs in these cases would mean:

>>> the federal government could not restrict tailpipe emissions because of vehicles’ impact on climate, even though transportation is the country’s largest source of greenhouse gases.
>>> the government also would not be able to force electric utilities to replace fossil fuel-fired power plants (the second-largest source of planet warming pollution), with wind and solar power, and
>>> executive branch could no longer consider the economic costs of climate change when evaluating whether to approve a new oil pipeline or similar project or environmental rule.

Those limitations on climate action in the United States, which has pumped more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, would quite likely doom the world’s goal of cutting enough emissions to keep the planet from heating up more than an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with the preindustrial age.

A temperature rise greater than 1.5 degrees Celsius is the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic hurricanes, drought, heat waves and wildfires significantly increases. The Earth has already warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius.

“If the Supreme Court uses this as an opportunity to really squash E.P.A.’s ability to regulate on Climate Change, it will seriously impede U.S. progress toward solving the problem,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

But many conservatives say the decision violates the separation of powers by allowing executive branch officials rather than judges to say what the law is. Associate Justice Gorsuch wrote that Chevron allowed “executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power.” In other words, elected judges and politicians are more qualified than scientists and agency experts to determine public harm when it comes to climate change and other environmental impacts.

Floating solar panels now in use

From an Article by Gabrielle See, CNBC Cable News, May 18, 2022

ARTICLE PHOTO ~ Power workers inspect photovoltaic power generation facilities at a 35 MW “fish-light complementary” photovoltaic power station in Binhai New Area, Haian City, East China’s Jiangsu Province, on March 15, 2022.

Record-high coal and gas prices have been pushing prices higher for consumers and businesses alike, but there could be a silver lining. According to the findings of climate analytics firm TransitionZero, it is now cheaper to switch from coal to clean energy, compared to switching from coal to gas — thanks to the falling cost of renewables and battery storage, coupled with the rising volatility of gas prices.

“The carbon price needed to incentivize the switch from coal generation to renewable energy for storage has dipped to a negative price,” said Jacqueline Tao, an analyst at TransitionZero. “So essentially that means that you can actually switch to renewables at a cost saving,” she told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Wednesday.

The report claims that the global average cost of switching from coal to renewable energy has plunged by 99% since 2010, compared to switching from coal to gas.

Using its Coal to Clean Carbon Price Index — or C3PI project — the company measured the carbon price level it takes to motivate 25 countries to switch fuels, from existing coal to renewables such as new onshore wind or solar photovoltaics plus battery.

Their findings show that the carbon price required to incentivize the coal-to-clean energy switch has plummeted to -$62 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted on average in 2022. That’s compared to $235/tCO2 to incentive them to switch from coal to gas.

This challenges the place of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to transition from coal to clean energy like wind, solar and other renewables. Traditionally, gas has been considered a bridge from coal to renewables because burning gas has a lower carbon intensity than burning coal.

The coal-to-clean carbon price varies across regions, and the picture isn’t “as rosy” in Asia compared to the European Union due to differences in market structure and fuel price mechanisms, Tao said.

Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam still face a relatively high cost of transitioning directly to renewables from coal. According to Tao, these countries have traditionally lagged in the renewable energy transition due to fossil fuel subsidies for domestic producers of coal and gas.

Hedging against climate risks

But beyond cost savings, renewable energy also helps “enhance energy security concerns,” Tao said.

Investing in renewables provides a hedge against climate change risks, she told CNBC. “Banks are increasingly finding it risky to lend to these fossil fuel assets in the concern that they will become stranded assets in the near term down the road due to the global energy transition,” she explained.

“That’s going to mean that there’s going to be limited upstream supply that’s going to come online, and we are going to see increasingly tight gas markets and fossil fuel markets in general that will be prone to demand and supply shocks.”

On the other hand, fossil fuel infrastructures could face physical risks as a result of climate change and extreme-weather events, she added. “We think that investing in renewable energy now would provide a hedge.”

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NOTE ~ Waiting for Godot | Summary, Characters, & Facts | Britannica

“Waiting for Godot” is a tragicomedy in two acts by Irish writer Samuel Beckett that was published in 1952 in French as “En attendant Godotand” first produced in 1953. “Waiting for Godot” was a true innovation in drama and the Theatre of the Absurd’s first theatrical success.

Cost & efficiency of energy storage systems are under study

From an Article by Matthew Hutson, The New Yorker, April 18, 2022

The German word Dunkelflaute means “dark doldrums.” It chills the hearts of renewable-energy engineers, who use it to refer to the lulls when solar panels and wind turbines are thwarted by clouds, night, or still air. On a bright, cloudless day, a solar farm can generate prodigious amounts of electricity; when it’s gusty, wind turbines whoosh neighborhoods to life. But at night solar cells do little, and in calm air turbines sit useless. These renewable energy sources stop renewing until the weather, or the planet, turns.

The dark doldrums make it difficult for an electrical grid to rely totally on renewable energy. Power companies need to plan not just for individual storms or windless nights but for Dunkelflaute that stretch for days or longer. Last year, Europe experienced a weeks-long “wind drought,” and in 2006 Hawaii endured six weeks of consecutive rainy days. On a smaller scale, factories, data centers, and remote communities that want to go all-renewable need to fill the gaps. Germany is decommissioning its nuclear power plants and working hard to embrace renewables, but, because of the problem of “intermittency” in its renewable power supply, it remains dependent on fossil fuels—including imported Russian gas.

The obvious solution is batteries. The most widespread variety is called lithium-ion, or Li-ion, after the chemical process that makes it work. Such batteries power everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles; they are relatively inexpensive to make and getting cheaper. But typical models exhaust their stored energy after only three or four hours of maximum output, and—as every iPhone owner knows—their capacity dwindles, little by little, with each recharge. It is expensive to collect enough batteries to cover longer discharges. And batteries can catch fire—sites in South Korea have ignited dozens of times in the past few years.

Venkat Srinivasan, a scientist who directs the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (access), at the Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, told me that one of the biggest problems with Li-ion batteries is their supply chain. The batteries depend on lithium and cobalt. In 2020, some seventy per cent of the world’s cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Unless we have diversity, we’re going to be in trouble,” Srinivasan said. Any disruption to the supply chain can strongly affect prices and availability. Moreover, a lot of water and energy are required for mining the metals, which can cause environmental damage, and some cobalt-mining operations involve child labor. Experts doubt that Li-ion prices will drop more than thirty per cent below their current levels without significant technological advancements—a drop that is still too small, according to the Department of Energy. We need to expand our capacity; by one estimate, we’ll require at least a hundred times more storage by 2040 if we want to shift largely to renewables and avoid climate catastrophe. We may somehow find clean and reliable ways to mine, distribute, and recycle the ingredients for Li-ion batteries. And yet that seems unlikely. Although we usually think about renewable energy in terms of its sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels, that’s only half the picture. Ideally, we’d pair renewable energy with renewable storage.

We already have one kind of renewable energy storage: more than ninety per cent of the world’s energy-storage capacity is in reservoirs, as part of a remarkable but unsung technology called pumped-storage hydropower. Among other things, “pumped hydro” is used to smooth out spikes in electricity demand. Motors pump water uphill from a river or a reservoir to a higher reservoir; when the water is released downhill, it spins a turbine, generating power again. A pumped-hydro installation is like a giant, permanent battery, charged when water is pumped uphill and depleted as it flows down.

The facilities can be awe-inspiring: the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, in Virginia, consists of two sprawling lakes, about a quarter of a mile apart in elevation, among tree-covered slopes; at times of high demand, thirteen million gallons of water can flow every minute through the system, which supplies power to hundreds of thousands of homes. Some countries are expanding their use of pumped hydro, but the construction of new facilities in the United States peaked decades ago. The right geography is hard to find, permits are difficult to obtain, and construction is slow and expensive. The hunt is on for new approaches to energy storage.

Quidnet, a Houston-based startup, is one of many companies exploring the possibilities. Last month, I sat in an F-150 King Ranch pickup with Scott Wright, its vice-president of operations, and Jason Craig, its C.O.O., as we drove to one of its test sites, on a farm west of San Antonio. Fields and billboards whizzed by as Craig explained, from the back seat, that Quidnet had patented a new kind of pumped hydro. Instead of pumping water uphill, the company’s system sends it underground through a pipe reaching at least a thousand feet down. Later, the system lets the Earth squeeze the water back up under pressure, using it to drive generators. Wright and Craig are veterans of the oil and gas industry, and Quidnet’s technology is like a green riff on fracking. In that technique, fluid is injected underground, where it builds up pressure that fractures rocks, releasing natural gas. Quidnet uses some of the same equipment and expertise, but with a different goal: the water is meant to be sandwiched between layers of rock, forming underground reservoirs that can be released on demand.

As we drove, I asked about the blackouts Texas experienced in February of 2021, when a winter storm shut down gas plants for several days and left millions without power. More than two hundred people died. The crisis had many causes, including the fact that Texas is the only state whose power grid isn’t connected to grids in other states. “We were pulling buckets of water out of the neighbor’s pool to get toilets to flush,” Wright said. “It definitely screams for some way to store power to lessen the burden on the grid in times like that.”

The artificial underground reservoirs created by companies like Quidnet are known to engineers as “lenses,” because of their shape. (“I say whoopee cushion and people don’t like it,” Craig said.) Initially, Quidnet encountered skepticism about its ability to form lenses of the right size and shape. By the time I visited, however, it had successfully completed multiple pumping cycles in Texas, Ohio, and Alberta. The company has received thirty-eight million dollars in private and government funding, including contributions from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, established by Bill Gates.

Quidnet has benefitted from an energy-storage gold rush. In 2018, the Department of Energy awarded thirty million dollars in funding to ten groups, including Quidnet, through a program called Duration Addition to electricitY Storage, or days. Before leaving office, President Donald Trump signed into law the Energy Act of 2020, which included the bipartisan Better Energy Storage Technology (best) Act, authorizing a billion dollars to be spent over five years on the “research, development, and demonstration” of new energy-storage technology. Many states are now setting storage-capacity targets, and in 2018 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued Order 841, which integrates stored energy into the wholesale electricity market. “There’s been a recognition that this is a technology whose time has come,” Jason Burwen, of the American Clean Power Association, told me. But a vast distance separates an engineer’s whiteboard from reality. Many renewable-storage technologies receiving funding will turn out to be too impractical, expensive, or inefficient for widespread adoption.

As we approached the farm, Craig mused on the raw physicality of many companies’ approaches. The basic principles are ones you might recall from high-school physics. If you put effort into lifting an object, it stores potential energy; if you then let that object fall, its potential energy becomes kinetic energy, which is capable of powering a generator and creating electricity. The same holds for many physical actions. In addition to lifting weights, energy-storage companies are compressing air or water, or making objects spin, or heating them up. If you use clean energy to do the initial work and find a green way to store and release it, you’ve created an ecologically responsible battery alternative.

“I’m kind of surprised and encouraged that the solutions to the long-duration-energy-storage problem could be the caveman stuff,” Craig said. Batteries depend on “pretty sophisticated electrochemistry that quickly gets outside of what I understand. And yet the solutions may be picking up heavy stuff with cranes, picking up the earth with a hydraulic jack. I think there’s some fellas in Nevada that are putting rocks in a train and rolling it uphill, then they come back down. Like, Fred Flintstone would be comfortable with most of this stuff. It could be the way.”

We pulled into the farm’s long drive. A kettle of vultures circled overhead. “You know what that means?” Craig asked. I already had one in mind. Was I about to see part of the future of green energy, or a curious and short-lived experiment in rural Texas?

Today’s Li-ion batteries are low-density by comparison, and renewable-storage systems also struggle to achieve density, convenience, and scale. The basic technology behind compressed-air energy storage goes back decades, and can involve pumping air into underground caverns, natural or artificial, then letting it out again. The first underground compressed-air facility was completed in 1978, in Germany; such systems can store and release vast amounts of energy. But, like pumped hydro, compressed-air facilities require the right geography and are expensive to build. They are also inefficient—typically, only half the energy put into pressurizing the gas can be retrieved.

Engineers are trying to improve density and efficiency. A Toronto-based company called Hydrostor has received more than three hundred million dollars in funding and is developing projects in California, Australia, and other places, to be brought online in the next five years. It stores compressed air in tanks, and holds on to the heat released during the air-compression process, which it then reapplies to the air during expansion, supercharging its ability to drive a turbine and generate electricity. A British company, Highview Power, is taking a more extreme tack, cooling air to more than three hundred degrees below zero, at which point it becomes a liquid. Liquid air is dense, and when Highview warms it, it gasifies rapidly, spinning turbine blades. Colin Roy, Highview’s executive chairman, told me that, when the company opens its tanks, air “explodes out with violent force.” It has built a prototype liquid-air system and is developing commercial plants in England and Spain.

Quidnet, too, is producing a refinement of pressure-based technology. At the company’s test site, we were greeted by Jacob and Sadie Schweers, the farm’s owners. About a year earlier, Quidnet had dispatched a drilling rig—a seventy-foot mast attached to a truck—to their property. Now a blue wellhead stood about ten feet tall, near a pump house the size of a shipping container, several yellow tanks, and a bunch of hoses. Water could be pumped from the tanks into the well, where it would be stored under pressure; then it could be released back to the tanks. Last month, Quidnet announced a pilot program to provide stored-energy technology to a utility in San Antonio.

We stepped inside the pump house to admire the pistons, the flywheel, and something called a pulsation dampener. A yellow five-hundred-horsepower diesel engine sat quietly in the back, ready to run the pump. “I love big machines and loud things and the smell of oil,” Wright said. In a commercial version of the system, an electric motor, ideally powered by clean energy, would pump the water, and act as a generator when the water returned.

As we walked back outside, into the hot sun, Wright gestured toward ten separate PVC pipes sticking out of the ground. They indicated the subterranean presence of tiltmeters, instruments for assessing the size and character of the lens by tracking the displacement of the rock; they can even sense the tidal tugging of the moon. We stood and chatted, and Craig said that the tanks would eventually be replaced by an attractive pond. Sadie Schweers told us that she likes to picture the whole farm running on solar panels and a Quidnet well.

Driving back in Wright’s truck, I thought about how things might look if Quidnet’s wells make headway. Today’s pumped-hydro plants form picturesque lakes on the Earth’s surface, but approaches like Quidnet’s would create reservoirs of pressurized energy beneath it. The company envisions terrain dotted with wellheads about half a mile apart, and a pond for every four. Wind turbines might rise skyward. The Earth itself would be a kind of giant battery.

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READER BEWARE ~ The descriptions above may be misleading as to the minimal environmental impacts of in-ground storage facilities. It is known that substantial disruptions to the Earth occur with hydro pumped storage projects. The Bath County project in Virginia is an extreme disturbance in the mountains, some say unsightly. Further, the proposed projects at Canaan Valley in Tucker County, WV, have been extremely unpopular in a highly scenic area, extending back to the 1960’s or earlier. DGN

Wind turbines growing more numerous and more powerful

From an Article by Rachel McDevitt, State Impact Pennsylvania, May 27, 2022

PHOTO IN ARTICLE ~ Turbines that are part of the Sandy Ridge Wind Farm in Centre and Blair counties. Wind energy is one option for electricity consumers in Pennsylvania.

The electric grid operator for the region that includes Pennsylvania is PJM (aka Pennsylvania – Jersey – Maryland) is preparing for a shift in electricity generation. There are nearly 700 Pennsylvania projects waiting in PJM’s queue. Most are solar projects. PJM recently released a road map for the grid of the future.

Over the next 15 years, it expects to add 100,000 megawatts of renewable power from sources including onshore and offshore wind, solar, and battery storage. Right now there are about 15,000 MW of renewables on the PJM grid. It takes one megawatt to power about 200 homes.

PJM estimates it will cost $3 billion to bring on those resources. Some of those costs could be offset by federal infrastructure money. But some will ultimately filter down to consumers’ bills. However, some experts argue that the low cost of generating renewable energy and a more efficient grid will save money in the long term.

To prepare, PJM is looking to streamline the process for new sources to join the grid and studying how to expand transmission and maintain reliability. Electric generators and municipalities within PJM recently voted to speed up and improve the process for getting new power on the grid. The plan is expected to go into effect later this year or in early 2023. Under it, proposed projects would be addressed on a first-ready, first-served basis rather than first come, first served. PJM would also simplify its analysis of project costs.

This PJM operator says the number of projects entering its New Services Queue has nearly tripled over the past four years, because of the rapid growth in renewables. PJM started this year with nearly 2,500 projects under study, with the vast majority of proposed megawatts coming from renewable or storage resources.

The plan would create a fast track for about 450 projects. There are nearly 700 Pennsylvania projects waiting in PJM’s queue. Most are solar projects.

PJM Interconnection coordinates the movement of electricity through all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Pennsylvania has a total generation capacity of more than 48,000 megawatts.

About StateImpact Pennsylvania ~ StateImpact Pennsylvania is a collaboration among WITF, WHYY, and the Allegheny Front. Reporters Reid Frazier, Rachel McDevitt and Susan Phillips cover the commonwealth’s energy economy. Read their reports on this site, and hear them on public radio stations across Pennsylvania.

Offshore wind farm near Block Island, R.I.

Essay by Christine Todd Whitman and Leon Panetta, POLITICO, January 28, 2022

When world leaders gathered last fall at COP26, it was billed as the “world’s last best chance” to save the planet from the climate crisis. The conference ended with real uncertainty as to whether comprehensive action will be taken, here and abroad, to avoid catastrophe. Fortunately, one of the best opportunities for progress is all around us: the waves, wind and water along the U.S.’s nearly 100,000 miles of coastline.

As the engine of our planet’s weather and climate systems, the ocean’s potential as a climate solution is as vast as the ocean itself. In fact, ocean-based climate action can provide 20 percent of the emissions reductions needed to achieve global targets to limit climate change and its effects. According to the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, “reductions of this magnitude are equivalent to the annual emissions from all coal-fired power plants worldwide or taking 2.5 billion cars off the road.”

Here are some key opportunities:

>>> Boost Offshore Renewables: Offshore renewables, like wind and wave energy, can help power the nation while cutting emissions. These sources of clean energy can serve as part of a just and equitable transition by providing economic benefits and abundant electricity to the communities that have suffered the most under climate change.

>>> Reduce Emissions from Shipping: We also need to look to the ocean to significantly reduce contributors of greenhouse gas emissions, such as maritime shipping, which generates more emissions than airlines. The administration, working with ports and the shipping industry, can implement strategies that will move us to zero-carbon shipping by 2050 to drastically reduce the climate contributions of cargo ships and freighters at sea. Infrastructure improvements at ports, fleet upgrades and alternative fuels can all be part of the effort.

>>> Rebuild Coastal Ecosystems: By protecting the ocean, we also enable the ocean to protect us through natural climate mitigation. Carbon-rich coastal environments like salt marshes, seagrass meadows and mangrove forests all naturally absorb carbon up to four times more effectively than trees on land. And when we conserve these habitats for their climate benefits, we are also protecting natural coastal infrastructure that will safeguard communities against storms and rising sea levels. This is particularly crucial for supporting marginalized communities, including low-income neighborhoods that were built in flood zones and are on the front lines of the climate crisis.

Washington has never before had a comprehensive ocean climate plan that weaves these efforts together. In order to realize the ocean’s potential to curb the climate crisis, the White House must marshal agencies across the government, so they are working in concert toward the same goals. President Joe Biden has taken a series of promising steps throughout his first year in office, but the U.S. still needs a coordinated federal strategy to turn this momentum into lasting results. The White House, to its credit, recently held itsfirst meeting of the congressionally authorized Ocean Policy Committee and made a commitment to develop a new cross-cutting strategy.

As the committee puts pen to paper, it should not waste the opportunity to map out the best strategies that embrace the ocean as a climate solution. From our time as Cabinet officials in previous administrations, we’ve been in the trenches on policymaking and know it is critical to have an overarching strategy rather than letting each agency chart its own path. A coordinated policy approach is more effective because it allows the administration to identify big picture goals and eliminate duplicative efforts.

Today, we work with a bipartisan effort to catalyze action toward meaningful ocean policy reform called the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative. Alongside over 100 ocean policy leaders — ranging from outdoor recreation brands to professional surfing organizations — we stand ready to join with the administration to advance a comprehensive ocean climate action plan.

It’s true that political disagreement has delayed climate action for far too long. While we come from different parties, we’ve found common cause on ocean policy and see it as a particularly fruitful area of bipartisan cooperation.

After all, our ocean and coastlines are vital to our economic and national security. They are also the foundation for what we call the “Blue Economy,” which acknowledges the wealth of marine resources — from sustainable fishing to aquaculture to shipping to tourism — that must be balanced sustainably to support jobs and economic growth. With the Blue Economy expected to grow at twice the rate of the overall economy, it is hard to imagine a better return on investment than securing the health and future of our ocean.

Now more than ever, we need to be taking every opportunity to avoid climate catastrophe — and the clock is ticking. From Category 5 hurricanes on the East Coast, to wildfires out West, to devastating tornadoes in the Midwest, we’re seeing the effects of climate change every day. Our country is poised like never before to advance bold climate action, and a coordinated ocean climate action plan can help turn that tide.

The ocean makes up over 70 percent of our planet. We believe it can help save the planet itself.

NOTE ~ Christine Todd Whitman is the former governor of New Jersey, former EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, and serves as co-chair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative Leadership Council. ALSO, Leon Panetta served as the CIA director and defense secretary under President Barack Obama, as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and was a former co-chair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative Leadership Council.

Dominion Energy plans extensive wind farm offshore in VA

From an Article by Sarah Vogelsong, Virginia Mercury, November 5, 2021

Dominion Energy revised the price tag of its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project upward to $9.8 billion from an earlier estimate of $8 billion, company executives announced Friday in an investor call.

Dominion CEO, chair and president Bob Blue attributed the more than 20 percent jump to “commodity and general cost pressures,” as well as the completion of design plans for bringing the power generated by the wind farm to customers onshore in Virginia Beach.

Over the next 30 years, the utility projected the wind project would cost the average Dominion residential customer in Virginia an extra $4 a month, with an initial increase starting September 2022 of approximately $1.45 more per month. During the call, Blue said the project’s increased price tag did not impact those estimates because the company is also projecting that the wind farm will be more productive than originally expected.

On Friday’s investor call, Blue told analysts that $1 billion in federal tax credits for the project could help drive down some of the bill impacts for customers. The company has also said that fuel savings costs are expected to amount to $3 billion over the wind farm’s first 10 years.

Dominion’s plans must be approved by the State Corporation Commission, although provisions of the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act declaring the utility’s construction of the project to be “in the public interest” and directing approval of certain costs will largely tie regulators’ hands.

Offshore wind, along with nuclear, is a key cornerstone of the utility’s efforts to decarbonize its electric fleet — the goal of the VCEA as well as Dominion’s own net-zero pledge. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project “is essential to meeting the policy goals set forth in the VCEA and other legislation mandating the development and deployment of renewable generation resources.”

Critics, however, have contended that the language of the VCEA dealing with offshore wind constitutes an unnecessary giveaway to Dominion that will saddle customers with unreasonable costs. One ProPublica-Richmond Times-Dispatch investigation found that a late change to the law requested by Dominion increased the allowable costs associated with the wind project from $7.3 to $9.8 billion.

One 2020 estimate by the SCC found that by 2030, the VCEA could increase customers’ electricity costs by $800 annually. Republicans, fresh from retaking control of the House of Delegates and executive branch in elections Tuesday, on Thursday said one of their priorities would be rolling back Democrats’ climate change policies, of which the VCEA was the most prominent.

Asked about whether Dominion expects a change in energy policy out of Richmond during Friday’s investor call, Blue said that the utility over the past 15 years “has maintained constructive relationships with members of both parties, and we don’t see any reason that would change.”

Challenges of off-shore wind installations for clean energy

From an Article by Sarah Vogelsong, Virginia Mercury, November 30, 2020

Maybe, if you squint really hard and the skies are clear, you might be able to convince yourself that you see them, out on the horizon: two turbines spinning far offshore of Virginia Beach.

You can’t, of course — the distance to the Dominion Energy-owned offshore wind outpost is too great. Bill Murray, a senior executive with Dominion, describes it this way: Imagine, he says, that the USS Wisconsin, a World War II-era battleship now docked at Norfolk, were to be beached at Sandbridge and from there fire its 16-inch guns, capable of traveling 21 miles. “Those guns could not hit these turbines,” said Murray.

Until recently, Virginia’s offshore wind dreams seemed to many an equally long shot. Dominion’s two test turbines, known as the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Pilot, were a decade in the making. During that time offshore wind boomed in Europe and China, but the U.S., preoccupied with the glut of natural gas unlocked by the shale revolution, made few inroads into the technology. Rhode Island’s Block Island wind farm was the nation’s first offshore wind venture in state waters; Dominion’s CVOW pilot 27 miles off the coast is the first in federal waters.

Today, however, U.S. enthusiasm for natural gas is wavering, and offshore wind has seen a dramatic upswing in interest. Roughly a dozen major offshore wind projects have been announced along the East Coast with the potential to provide 30 gigawatts of energy to residents of the Atlantic seaboard. Much of the activity has occurred in the maritime states of New England and the upper mid-Atlantic, especially Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. The farther south you go, the less the idea seems to have caught on.

Virginia is a major exception. Here, offshore wind has become the most ambitious and expensive part of the state’s plan to meet Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s goal of achieving a carbon-free electric grid by 2050. Last December, Dominion announced plans to build the nation’s largest offshore wind farm in its federal lease area off Virginia Beach at an estimated cost of $8 billion. Wind developer Avangrid, which is behind the Kitty Hawk project in North Carolina, is also eyeing the state as a possible destination for its power, although no contracts have been signed.

“Electrically, the easiest place for us to connect is in Virginia Beach,” said Eric Thumma, Avangrid’s senior director of new business for offshore wind.

When Democrats took the majority in both houses of the General Assembly in 2020, they came in with the desire to remake Virginia’s electric grid. Offshore wind quickly became the most controversial part of their proposals due to its cost and the profits the politically powerful Dominion stood to make from its development. The Virginia Clean Economy Act’s declaration that 5.2 gigawatts of the resource — more than all of the state’s nuclear units and its largest gas-fired plant combined — is in the public interest provoked a bitter fight that continues to divide Democrats.

Tensions only increased after a ProPublica-Richmond Times-Dispatch investigation earlier this fall uncovered a last-minute change to the law that authorizes Dominion to spend an extra $2.5 billion on its offshore enterprise. Depending on who you ask, the VCEA is either another utility giveaway or a vital part of a clean energy portfolio that will act as an engine for economic growth.

Much of the uneasiness over offshore wind comes down to its cost. Because Dominion is in the generation as well as transmission and distribution business, it reaps profits from building things — and the bigger the project, the greater the profits. At an estimated $8 billion, CVOW will be the largest it’s ever undertaken. A second wind farm of equal size would add billions more to the bottom line.

Offshore wind is necessary, Dominion executives say. “We simply can’t rely on solar alone or energy efficiency alone to get us to a carbon-free grid,” said Katharine Bond, the company’s vice president of public policy and state affairs. Industry experts agree wind is an ideal complement to solar because it tends to peak at night and in the winter, when solar is at its lowest. And for Dominion, whose Virginia territory is less well suited to onshore wind than the mountaintop ridges enjoyed by Appalachian Power, that leaves offshore wind as the primary solution.

“A carbon-free grid has to be a more diverse grid because of the intermittency of renewables,” said Murray. “There’s a tendency a little bit in energy policy to say, ‘OK, solar right now is the cheapest renewable, let’s just do all solar.’ And more incremental energy between noon and five is at some point not helpful.”

But while few supporters of weaning Virginia’s grid off carbon think offshore wind shouldn’t be part of the portfolio, many caution that Dominion shouldn’t be given carte blanche on spending.

Regulators’ ability to review offshore wind costs remains unclear. The VCEA includes language indicating the commission should sign off on CVOW costs unless certain specific conditions aren’t met, but even State Corporation Commissioners seemed unsure during hearings this October about how restrictive the law is. “What’s the play in the joints that is left after need and cost have been essentially predetermined?” Judge Mark Christie asked at one point.

Still, many clean energy advocates say regulators retain ultimate oversight. The Clean Economy Act’s language favoring renewables is “an expression of the General Assembly that they support this type of generation technology, but it’s not a mandate for the commission to approve any particular project,” energy attorney Will Reisinger told regulators during the same hearings. In an extended legal argument touching on the law’s history and wording, Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Will Cleveland said “the commission retains ultimate authority over whether a specific proposed offshore wind project’s costs are reasonable and prudent.”

Whether regulators will agree is a question several months from being answered.

Dominion Energy is at the helm — but not alone

Energy issues, of course, have always been intricately intertwined with economic ones. Dominion has “been in the economic development business for decades,” said Murray. “Electric utilities are for economic development. In a way it’s altruistic, in a way it’s self-serving because any type of economic development plugs into the grid.”

But offshore wind takes the connection to a new level. Virtually all of the discussion and work surrounding Virginia’s wind goals center not on energy, but on the economy.

Part of that focus is due to the high threshold for entry into offshore wind development. Because the investments required for the technology are so high and only a limited number of government leases for sites are available, the industry’s pool of players is small.

In Virginia right now, Dominion is at the helm. The utility is the only company that owns a lease in federal waters off the state’s coast. And unlike other utilities to the north, which have relied on non-utilities to develop projects that they then acquire power from, Dominion is actively involved in not only developing but building offshore wind, and it has indicated in its long-range planning that it’s interested in developing more than the CVOW project, and potentially all 5.2 gigawatts of the offshore target.

Still, other companies like Avangrid and Danish firm Ørsted, which partnered with Dominion on the CVOW pilot, have signaled strong interest in Virginia. Ørsted has leased 40 acres at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal, and Thumma said Avangrid, which opened an office in Virginia Beach this fall, is “open to lots of different opportunities.” Siemens Gamesa has also publicly said Hampton Roads is among the locations it’s considering for a turbine manufacturing facility.

“One of the key elements of getting a project done is making sure you have an offtaker,” said Bruce Burcat, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition. “And what the VCEA does, just like similar types of statutes in states like Maryland or New Jersey or Delaware or Pennsylvania, is there is now a market for the offtake of the energy.”

Still, all eyes are on Dominion. How the utility navigates the state and federal permitting processes it has to undergo to get the full CVOW project underway will provide a template for other companies interested in Virginia who may be wary to put down money in these early months.

“There’s going to be a reticence to invest until we actually see projects and steel in the waters,” said Thumma.

Limited number of on-shore wind locations

The VCEA doesn’t limit wind development to offshore. Onshore wind is folded into the 16,100 megawatt and 600 megawatt targets set for Dominion and Appalachian Power to meet by 2035, and both welcomed proposals for onshore projects this summer.

Still, unlike the flat and windy Midwest, Virginia is less suited to onshore wind, with the most promising areas located along its western ridges in Appalachian Power territory. “One of the biggest challenges with Virginia and onshore wind is the wind resources are located in the most difficult terrain,” said Director of Mines, Minerals and Energy John Warren. “There’s a limited amount of project sites that really fit for large utility-scale onshore wind.” To date, only one, the Rocky Forge project developed by Apex Clean Energy, has made it through the permitting process in the commonwealth. Utility executives are expecting more to come. In October, Dominion Director of Integrated Resource Planning Glen Kelly told the SCC that the utility is “very open to onshore wind” and that it expects the resource to have a more robust presence in the utility’s future planning.

Dominion, for its part, is confident. Pointing to its successful navigation of the federal permitting process for the CVOW pilot — a process no other company has completed — Dominion executive Bond said the utility has “a set of experiences that others in the United States don’t necessarily have.” With that experience, Dominion is moving swiftly to develop the full CVOW project. After months surveying its lease area and taking core samples to determine how the massive turbines should be engineered, it intends to file its required construction and operations plan with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management this December.

The company is also hoping to skirt some of the environmental problems other high-profile projects like Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts have encountered. CVOW’s location 27 miles off the coast “reduces concerns for birds,” said Bond. It limits fisheries impacts as well, although the state’s 19 black sea bass and conch fishermen remain concerned about how closures due to construction and the presence of 188 turbines, three substations and extensive cabling will affect their livelihood.

“The real challenge that we’re running into is there’s not a great roadmap,” said Todd Janeski, a fisheries coordinator with the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program. “Ultimately, how this project does move forward here will inform” other efforts down the road.

Creating an industry from scratch

Ironically, then, with Dominion preparing to file its plans with federal regulators, most of the offshore wind action in Virginia is happening on dry land.

These preparations are all about the economy. Because offshore wind turbines require manufacturing on a monumental scale and the U.S. has no supply chain in place to build them, states from Massachusetts to Virginia are scrambling to position themselves as offshore wind hubs that can not only operate new wind farms but manufacture and maintain the parts that run them.

“We’re trying to create an industry from scratch,” said Doug Smith, president and CEO of the Hampton Roads Alliance, an economic development group closely involved in bringing offshore wind to Virginia.

Local and state officials, as well as regional business groups, think Hampton Roads is one of the best candidates for the role. The region possesses a deepwater port that, thanks to the U.S. naval base at Norfolk, isn’t obstructed by bridges that could block vessels ferrying turbine components out to sea. The Navy’s presence has also fostered a robust manufacturing sector that’s oriented toward shipbuilding but could easily expand into offshore wind. And Dominion has plans underway to develop a Hampton Roads-based vessel capable of installing wind turbine components — a major hole in the U.S. portfolio.

“There’s no harbor or port that has the existing infrastructure and workforce that Virginia has,” said Chris Gullickson, director of economic development for the Port of Virginia.

Virginia has already committed significant resources to convincing the fledgling industry that Hampton Roads is the ideal site for a hub, though it has also reached an agreement with North Carolina and Maryland to collaborate in promoting the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic as a regional center for the new energy source. The state’s 2020 budget included $40 million for upgrades at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal, primarily dealing with soil stabilization and reinforcement that will ensure the port can handle parts of turbines that will stand taller than the Washington Monument and have blades longer than seven football fields placed end to end.

“This is the last small piece that we need that will make a huge difference to the industry,” said Jennifer Palestrant, chief deputy of the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy.

Meanwhile, the 2020 General Assembly established a new Division of Offshore Wind within the department that Palestrant said aims to be “the convener for how we develop offshore wind” and allotted $375,000 to stand the new office up. Among the new partners for the division? The Hampton Roads Alliance, which this September was awarded more than half a million dollars in state GO Virginia grant funds to help develop the offshore wind supply chain. The funding followed the group’s establishment this summer of an office in Frankfurt, Germany, that will allow the Alliance to explore partnerships in Europe, where Smith said “the major players of the industry are.” One consultancy, PM&P, has been working with the Alliance to develop a strategic plan for how Hampton Roads can attract offshore wind manufacturers.

Along the East Coast, “there’s going to be a limited number of hubs around the supply chain,” said Smith. “We want to really understand what that looks like.”

A potential boom for workers

One thing is clear: if Hampton Roads becomes one of the East Coast’s top offshore wind hubs, Virginia’s looking at a lot of new jobs. One study by Mangum Economics estimates that for every gigawatt of offshore wind developed, Virginia could see 5,200 new jobs annually.

Most of those are likely to be local to Hampton Roads. The VCEA sets no firm quotas for the hiring of Virginia workers for wind farms, although it does require Dominion to draft a plan for how it will use both local workers and veterans in building out its project — a provision Southeastern Wind Coalition President Katharine Kollins said is “nebulous” but important.

Still, she pointed out, offshore wind energy production is labor intensive. “A solar farm takes care of itself,” she said. “An offshore wind project needs daily operations and maintenance on at least one of the turbines. … You’ve got folks out there every single day who are ensuring these things are running.”

The more manufacturing operations Virginia attracts, the more that workforce is likely to grow as other states build out their projects.

“It’s not just our project. If you look at the queue, the pipeline of projects up and down the East Coast continues to grow,” said Dominion spokesperson Rayhan Daudani. “You develop that workforce not just to construct the 2.6 gigawatts and then have the ongoing (operations and maintenance), but all up and down the East Coast there will be the opportunity to train them here, hire them here.”

One potential game changer would be the development of Dominion’s offshore wind vessel. Currently the only ships capable of installing offshore wind infrastructure are European, but the federal Jones Act bars foreign ships from carrying shipments between U.S. ports. If the utility can get its vessel in operation by 2023 as planned, it would prove a major inducement for manufacturers to locate near its home base of Hampton Roads.

Training, of course, will be necessary. “There’s only a handful of people in Virginia that are qualified to even step foot on a turbine,” said Paul Olsen, executive director of programs and partnerships at Old Dominion University, which has partnered with DMME to help advance offshore wind in the state. “We need to create hundreds of skilled positions.”

Officials are looking to Virginia’s community and technical colleges, as well as manufacturers, to help fill the gap. In October, Gov. Northam announced the creation of a new training alliance to offer certifications for offshore wind work. Partners include Martinsville’s New College Institute, Centura College and Norfolk’s Mid-Atlantic Maritime Academy. And officials like Palestrant said they expect skills from Hampton Roads’ existing maritime industry to be easily transferable.

“The technical colleges are already very very interested in providing programs for students to then go straight into these jobs,” said Kollins. “Once we see the development really start to take place … you’re really going to see more and more students entering these courses knowing there’s a job for them at the end of the day.”

(First in a series on Virginia’s transition to a carbon-free electric grid. Tomorrow: What role will utility-scale solar projects play?)

Wind farms are already operating in the Allegheny Highlands of WV

From an Article by Tara Lohan, The Revelator, May 30, 2020

The first official tallies are in: Coronavirus-related shutdowns helped slash daily global emissions of carbon dioxide by 14 percent in April. But the drop won’t last, and experts estimate that annual emissions of the greenhouse gas are likely to fall only about 7 percent this year.

After that, unless we make substantial changes to global economies, it will be back to business as usual — and a path that leads directly to runaway climate change. If we want to reverse course, say the world’s leading scientists, we have about a decade to right the ship.

That’s because we’ve squandered a lot of time. “The 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s were lost decades for preventing global climate disaster,” political scientist Leah Stokes writes in her new book Short Circuiting Policy, which looks at the history of clean energy policy in the U.S.

But we don’t all bear equal responsibility for the tragic delay.

“Some actors in society have more power than others to shape how our economy is fueled,” writes Stokes, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We are not all equally to blame.”

This book Short Circuiting Policy focuses on the role of one particularly bad actor: electric utilities. Their history of obstructing a clean-energy transition in the U.S. has been largely overlooked, with most of the finger-pointing aimed at fossil fuel companies (and for good reason).

We spoke with Stokes about this history of delay and denial from the utility industry, how to accelerate the speed and scale of clean-energy growth, and whether we can get past the polarizing rhetoric and politics around clean energy.

QUESTION — What lessons can we learn from your research to guide us right now, in what seems like a really critical time in the fight to halt climate change?

PROF. STOKES — What a lot of people don’t understand is that to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we actually have to reduce emissions by around 7-8 percent every single year from now until 2030, which is what the emissions drop is likely to be this year because of the COVID-19 crisis.

So think about what it took to reduce emissions by that much and think about how we have to do that every single year.

It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be some big sacrifice, but it does mean that we need government policy, particularly at the federal level, because state policy can only go so far. We’ve been living off state policy for more than three decades now and we need our federal government to act.

Where are we now, in terms of our progress on renewable energy and how far we need to go?

A lot of people think renewable energy is growing “so fast” and it’s “so amazing.” But first of all, during the coronavirus pandemic, the renewable energy industry is actually doing very poorly. It’s losing a lot of jobs. And secondly, we were not moving fast enough even before the coronavirus crisis, because renewable energy in the best year grew by only 1.3 percent.

Right now we’re at around 36-37 percent clean energy. That includes nuclear, hydropower and new renewables like wind, solar and geothermal. But hydropower and nuclear aren’t growing. Nuclear supplies about 20 percent of the grid and hydro about 5 percent depending on the year. And then the rest is renewable. So we’re at about 10 percent renewables, and in the best year, we’re only adding 1 percent to that.

Generally, we need to be moving about eight times faster than we’ve been moving in our best years. (To visualize this idea, I came up with the narwhal curve.)

QUESTION — How do we overcome these fundamental issues of speed and scale?

PROF. STOKES — We need actual government policy that supports it. We have never had a clean electricity standard or renewable portfolio standard at the federal level. That’s the main law that I write all about at the state level. Where those policies are in place, a lot of progress has been made — places like California and even, to a limited extent, Texas.

We need our federal government to be focusing on this crisis. Even the really small, piecemeal clean-energy policies we have at the federal level are going away. In December Congress didn’t extend the investment tax credit and the production tax credit, just like they didn’t extend or improve the electric vehicle tax credit.

And now during the COVID-19 crisis, a lot of the money going toward the energy sector in the CARES Act is going toward propping up dying fossil fuel companies and not toward supporting the renewable energy industry.

So we are moving in the wrong direction.

QUESTION— Clean energy hasn’t always been such a partisan issue. Why did it become so polarizing?

PROF. STOKES— What I argue in my book, with evidence, is that electric utilities and fossil fuel companies have been intentionally driving polarization. And they’ve done this in part by running challengers in primary elections against Republicans who don’t agree with them.

Basically, fossil fuel companies and electric utilities are telling Republicans that you can’t hold office and support climate action. That has really shifted the incentives within the party in a very short time period.

It’s not like the Democrats have moved so far left on climate. The Democrats have stayed in pretty much the same place and the Republicans have moved to the right. And I argue that that’s because of electric utilities and fossil fuel companies trying to delay action.

And their reason for doing that is simply about their bottom line and keeping their share of the market?

Exactly. You have to remember that delay and denial on climate change is a profitable enterprise for fossil fuel companies and electric utilities. The longer we wait to act on the crisis, the more money they can make because they can extract more fossil fuels from their reserves and they can pay more of their debt at their coal plants and natural gas plants. So delay and denial is a money-making business for fossil fuel companies and electric utilities.

There’s been a lot of research, reporting and even legal action in recent years about the role of fossil fuel companies in discrediting climate science. From reading your book, it seems that electric utilities are just as guilty. Is that right?

Yes, far less attention has been paid to electric utilities, which play a really critical role. They preside over legacy investments into coal and natural gas, and some of them continue to propose building new natural gas.

They were just as involved in promoting climate denial in the 1980s and 90s as fossil fuel companies, as I document in my book. And some of them, like Southern Company, have continued to promote climate denial to basically the present day.

But that’s not the only dark part of their history.

Electric utilities promoted energy systems that are pretty wasteful. They built these centralized fossil fuel power plants rather than having co-generation plants that were onsite at industrial locations where manufacturing is happening, and where you need both steam heat — which is a waste product from electricity — and the electricity itself. That actually created a lot of waste in the system and we burned a lot more fossil fuels than if we had a decentralized system.

The other thing they’ve done in the more modern period is really resisted the energy transition. They’ve resisted renewable portfolio standards and net metering laws that allow for more clean energy to come onto the grid. They’ve tried to roll them back. They’ve been successful in some cases, and they’ve blocked new laws from passing when targets were met.

QUESTION — You wrote that, “Partisan polarization on climate is not inevitable — support could shift back to the bipartisanship we saw before 2008.” What would it take to actually make that happen?

PROF. STOKES — Well, on the one hand, you need to get the Democratic Party to care more about climate change and to really understand the stakes. And if you want to do that, I think the work of the Justice Democrats is important. They have primary-challenged incumbent Democrats who don’t care enough about climate change. That is how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected. She was a primary challenger and she has really championed climate action in the Green New Deal.

The other thing is that the public supports climate action. Democrats do in huge numbers. Independents do. And to some extent Republicans do, particularly young Republicans.

So communicating the extent of public concern on these issues is really important because, as I’ve shown in other research, politicians don’t know how much public concern there is on climate change. They dramatically underestimate support for climate action.

I think the media has a really important role to play because it’s very rare that a climate event, like a disaster that is caused by climate change, is actually linked to climate change in media reporting.

But people might live through a wildfire or a hurricane or a heat wave, but nobody’s going to tell them through the media that this is climate change. So we really need our reporters to be doing a better job linking people’s lived experiences to climate change.

QUESTION — With economic stimulus efforts ramping up because of the COVD-19 pandemic, are we in danger of missing a chance to help boost a clean energy economy?

PROF. STOKES — I think so many people understand that stimulus spending is an opportunity to rebuild our economy in a way that creates good-paying jobs in the clean-energy sector that protects Americans’ health.

We know that breathing dirty air makes people more likely to die from COVID-19. So this is a big opportunity to create an economy that’s more just for all Americans.

But unfortunately, we really are not pivoting toward creating a clean economy, which is what we need to be doing. This is an opportunity to really focus on the climate crisis because we have delayed for more than 30 years. There is not another decade to waste.

We all live downstream of energy & environmental issues

By Evan Hansen, Opinion – Editorial, Charleston Gazette – Mail, October 19, 2019

In his October 2nd op-ed, United Mineworkers of America President Cecil Roberts makes an excellent point. We should work together to develop a more sustainable, robust economy in Appalachia that provides opportunity for every working family, including coal miners. I couldn’t agree more.

We needed to start this conversation at least a decade ago. This became evident when I co-authored a report in 2010 that concluded:

……. “Coal production in Central Appalachia is on the decline, and this decline will likely continue in the coming decades. Given the numerous challenges working against any substantial recovery of the region’s coal industry, and that production is projected to decline significantly in the coming decades, diversification of Central Appalachian economies is now more critical than ever. State and local leaders should support new economic development across the region, especially in the rural areas set to be the most impacted by a sharp decline in the region’s coal economy.” ….

I’m not a psychic, and I don’t tell fortunes. But I do review data. Even in 2010, it was clear that coal production was plummeting in West Virginia as natural gas drilling picked up steam, renewables dropped in price and the rich coal reserves in the southern coalfields dwindled.

While this decline in coal production was predictable, I couldn’t imagine back then that I would get elected to the House of Delegates, where I now have a window into the policies that state leaders implement — or fail to implement — as this crisis gets worse.

And it truly is a crisis. Thousands of miners have lost their jobs. As coal companies declare bankruptcy, miners, retirees and their families face the prospects of losing pensions and health care benefits that they earned through years of hard work. Communities are breaking down, school systems are in trouble and the state budget is more difficult to balance. Drug addiction is rampant, life expectancy is down and thousands of children are in need of loving foster homes.

Many state leaders knew that this downward spiral was coming to West Virginia, but refused to publicly acknowledge it, let alone enact policies that, in Cecil’s words, would develop a more sustainable, robust economy. The result? A cruel transition toward poverty, hopelessness, and addiction.

Recently on the House floor, I spoke about the need for a just transition. A just transition starts with acknowledging reality — that Wests Virginia coal production has dropped from 162 to just 95 million tons since 2001. And that it is likely to drop further if more coal-fired power plants close. There will be fewer good, high-paying union coal mining jobs.

But a just transition also acknowledges that it’s unfair for coal miners — who have sacrificed so much over generations for this state and country — to be left behind as the country’s energy production shifts. In a just transition, we appreciate this history while fighting for new opportunities for miners and their families.

>>> Evan Hansen is a Democratic member of the West Virginia House of Delegates from Monongalia County and president of Downstream Strategies, an environmental and economic development consulting company.

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Renewable energy will power almost half of the Virginia government by 2022

From an Article by Sarah Vogelsong, Virginia Mercury, October 18, 2019

Virginia’s state government will get 45 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2022, officials announced Friday morning, exceeding a target established by Gov. Ralph Northam in a recent executive order committing the state to making its electric grid carbon free by 2050.

Both Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electric utility, and the VA governor’s office hailed the agreement as the largest contract by a state government for renewable energy.

“Clean and renewable energy is a critical key to fighting climate change and is one of the most effective tools we have to address and mitigate these impacts,” said Secretary of Natural Resources Matthew J. Strickler. “Today’s announcement, along with several other clean energy related initiatives currently underway, clearly demonstrate that Virginia is serious about investing in clean energy, reducing carbon emissions, and cleaning up air pollution to improve our environment.”