California continues to show its climate leadership, as the state legislature yesterday passed the groundbreaking Senate Bill 100 (De León) to bump its renewable portfolio standard from 50% to 60% by 2030, while pledging to achieve a 100% carbon-free grid by 2045. The state joins Hawaii, which had set a similar 2045 goal back in 2015.
California is now the leader within the U.S. at deploying renewables like solar and wind (excluding hydropower). Even Hawaii’s 2017 deployment of 27% renewables lags California’s at 35% in 2016, the latest years that figures are available.
The success of SB 100 (though Governor Brown has yet to sign it) is due in large part to the astounding decrease in the price of solar PV over the past decade. Despite utility objections, the state set the aggressive goal just three years ago of achieving 50% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Now just three years later, due to the speed and low cost of deployment, the legislature feels confident enough to boost that target an additional 10%.
And with the new “carbon-free” grid goal by 2045, California will have to ensure that its electricity mix includes only greenhouse-gas free sources like hydro, solar, wind, biomass, and perhaps nuclear. No longer will the state be able to rely on natural gas power plants to fill in the gaps in solar and wind production. And crucially, the legislation requires that achieving this target does not increase emissions elsewhere across the west. Otherwise, California has seen “resource shuffling” occur, where out-of-state renewables serve Californians instead of another state, causing the original state to replace the lost clean power with dirty energy.
Overall, the success of renewables deployment in the electricity sector is one of the primary reasons that California achieved its 2020 greenhouse goal four years early. And as the state moves to electrify more of its vehicles to reduce emissions from this growing sector, powering those vehicles from clean electricity will become even more critical.
Once again, while the federal government backslides, California is showing the country and the world what real leadership on clean technology and climate change looks like.
California legislators are currently considering legislation (AB 813) to expand our grid across the western U.S., which would help integrate variable renewable energy more economically across a broader geographic region. However, the bill is hung up on disputes around labor and governance, as well as concerns that a regional grid will lengthen the lifespan of coal-fired power plants across the west.
But in the meantime, California’s grid operator has been operating a successful “energy imbalance market” in western states, as explained in this helpful video overview:
While a regional grid would be more effective, the energy imbalance market is helping to spur renewable production across the west. In turn that deployment means more industry support for renewables, even in conservative states.
As expected, the Trump Administration today rolled out their proposed alternative regulation to the Obama-era Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon emissions from the U.S. power sector. The administration was in the somewhat awkward position of having to promulgate a climate rule by order of the U.S. Supreme Court, so the basic tack is to make the regulation effectively meaningless.
Here are some of the low-lights:
- EPA’s draft rule is expected to lower annual U.S. emissions by 0.7 percent to 1.5 percent by 2030 compared with a business-as-usual scenario, compared to 19 percent below the business-as-usual scenario with the original Clean Power Plan.
- The “foregone benefits” of the proposed rule means more pollution compared with the Clean Power Plan, particularly affecting residents in the Midwest, east to Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, with increases in premature death and morbidity (“foregone avoided deaths”), as my colleague Sean Hecht explains.
- The rule contains a new regulatory loophole that allows existing dirty fossil fuel plants to increase their hours of operation without triggering any new environmental review, as my colleague Meredith Hankins describes.
- The proposed rule has no standard for states to meet in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their power sector.
So for me there are four ultimate takeaways for the proposed rule:
- It is a giveaway to the coal industry at the expense of cheaper, cleaner power sources,
- It has multiple legally dubious provisions that will likely take years to resolve in court.
- It replaces an unfortunately weak rule in the Clean Power Plan, which was not going to push the power sector much more than existing state policies on renewables and the current supply of cheap natural gas.
- It means the real action on the U.S. power sector will occur when Democrats regain Congress and the Presidency, at which point they should (and probably will) prioritize some sort of national greenhouse gas standard for the U.S. power sector, as part of a federal response to climate change.
Until the politics change, however, we’ll have to watch this rule work its way through the courts.
The Obama EPA’s proposed “Clean Power Plan” was that administration’s big effort to regulate carbon pollution under the federal Clean Air Act. But now the Trump administration is set to propose an alternative approach this week that is likely to lead to more pollution and ironically less flexibility for the business community (similar to how the auto industry got an unwelcome full-scale rollback of clean car standards with potentially years of litigation and uncertainty to come).
The Obama Clean Power Plan was a response to the U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), in which the court ordered EPA to treat greenhouse gases as a traditional air pollutant under the statute. So when it came to implementing the order for the U.S. power sector, EPA’s Clean Power Plan was an effort to limit carbon emissions from power plants, particularly dirty coal-fired ones.
EPA’s approach was to regulate the whole system of power within a state, not just the plants themselves. This approach allowed states to come up with their own plans to meet federal targets set by EPA. The key was that these plans could regulate “beyond the fence line” of fossil fueled-power plants, to provide more flexibility to meet these targets. States could use a mix of energy efficiency, renewables, carbon trading, and energy storage to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the power sector as a whole.
The alternative “inside the fence line” approach would have required massive and expensive on-site upgrades to coal-fired power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, most likely through unproven and costly carbon capture and storage approaches, in which the carbon would be captured from the smokestack and pumped underground. Costs would have been passed on to ratepayers.
The upside of the “beyond the fence line” approach was that utilities and states would have significant flexibility to meet these EPA carbon targets in the most cost-effective, technologically proven way. The downside was the legal vulnerability it created, by calling into question just how far EPA’s reach could go in regulating the power sector.
Needless to say, coal industry leaders feared the negative impacts this plan would have on their power plants. And in Trump they’ve found a receptive audience.
According to the New York Times, the Trump EPA will reportedly release a new plan this week that will task states with coming up with their own plans and targets — even deciding not to set carbon targets at all. Furthermore, all of the regulatory action must happen “inside the fence line.”
The result of this weak approach will likely be a new lease on life for many coal plants in the U.S., and ironically much less flexibility for utilities and grid operators to meet any stringent targets set by states that truly want to reduce carbon from the power sector.
As with any Trump regulatory action, the new regulation will be litigated, and so far the Trump administration has been on an epic losing streak in the courts. And the continuing price declines of renewable energy and natural gas has generally made coal non-competitive going forward anyway.
This new move is yet another attempt by Trump’s team to rescue a dirty and dying industry through regulatory favoritism. Meanwhile, the litigation that will result may not be finalized by the time of the next presidential election, giving some hope for a political resolution and better result in the meantime.
The U.S. federal government has not provided much hope to climate advocates. The Trump administration has launched a full-scale assault on climate policies. But even under Obama, the level of action to tackle greenhouse gas emissions was not on pace with what’s needed to avert catastrophic warming.
But fortunately cities and states can do a lot on their own. America’s Pledge, an initiative co-founded by California Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recently released a report that provides “bottom-up” strategies for cities, states, and businesses to address climate change. As Utility Dive summarized, the ten opportunity areas include the following:
- Expanding renewable energy
- Accelerating retirement of coal power
- Retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency
- Electrifying buildings’ energy use
- Accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles
- Phasing out the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)
- Preventing methane leaks from gas wells
- Reducing methane leaks in cities
- Increasing carbon sequestration on land
- Establishing state and regional carbon markets
All of these areas do not necessarily require federal policy support (although it would be helpful), and many involve limiting emissions from powerful “short-lived climate pollutants” like methane and HFCs (I would also highlight land use and transit policies to promote smart growth as an important area of focus).
Straightforward examples at this level of policy making include developing energy efficiency building codes, steering municipal utilities to procure more renewable energy and energy storage, and providing incentives for electric vehicle adoption, such as through more charging stations and municipal fleet purchases.
But developing these policies at the state and local levels is more than just an effort to salvage climate policy in the face of federal inaction. We should be pursuing these policies anyway, for multiple reasons. Specifically, state and local action:
- Creates a decentralized web of climate policies that can’t be reversed with one bad national election that might deliver Congress or the presidency to climate deniers — producing more policy stability overall.
- Fosters local innovation that might result in successful programs or technologies that can scale nationwide or globally.
- Provides more accountability and flexibility on policy implementation, since decision makers will be in close proximity to those affected by the policies, both good and bad.
So while federal inaction on climate change can be a source of frustration and potential peril, it may also provide us with a good excuse to take action that needed to happen anyway — a silver lining on an otherwise dark storm cloud.
California has already achieved a landmark climate goal, we learned yesterday. Newly released data from 2016 by the California Air Resources Board show that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions decreased 2.7 percent to 429.4 million metric tons.
That number is significant because it’s below the 431 million metric tons the state produced in 1990, which is the level California law requires we achieve once again by 2020. And we’re now four years early on achieving that goal. Since our peak emissions in 2004, California has since dropped those emissions 13 percent.
Much of the reduction is due to significant increases in renewable energy production. Going forward, the next challenge will be a further 40 percent reduction below these 1990 levels by 2030, per SB 32 (Pavley, 2016). And that will require major decreases in emissions from the transportation sector — primarily through greater adoption of zero-emission vehicles.
Importantly, these emission reductions have occurred during a booming economy. The state has effectively de-linked economic growth from carbon-based energy. And all of this economic growth defies industry predictions back in 2006 when the 2020 goal in AB 32 was originally legislated.
As the Sacramento Bee reported at the time during the legislative debates:
[T]he measure [AB 32] is vigorously opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce and the petroleum industry.
”Climate change is real, and we do need to do things,” said Victor Weisser, president of California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, which represents oil firms. ”But greenhouse gas emissions reduction in California is going to be very expensive.”
In short, industry was not pleased with the climate goals and believed they would cause economic calamity, as another Bee article related:
“We don’t think heavy-handed regulation and bureaucracy is necessary,” said Thomas Tietz, who heads the California Nevada Cement Promotion Council.
Backers say AB 32 would spur new technologies, but Tietz warned that such caps will backfire on the local economy. He said the bill would drive cement producers out of state and force California to import materials produced from countries or states with less stringent environmental rules.
In retrospect, these predictions have not come true. Cement production hasn’t left the state, as industry figures show (although the sector hasn’t fully recovered since the last recession):
Overall, California’s success is a powerful example for the rest of the world and some important good news in the global fight against climate change.
With much of the credit due to the proliferation of inexpensive renewable energy, the next challenge will be to ensure similar progress with zero-emission vehicle technology. And given the state’s track record on climate so far, we should be hopeful that similar success is achievable for 2030.
With Trump’s 30 percent tariff on foreign solar panels scheduled to last four years from February (decreasing by 5 percent per year), how is the U.S. solar industry faring so far?
First, the good news. As E&E News covered [pay-walled], the Solar Energy Industries Association reported installations of 2.5 gigawatts in the first quarter of 2018, a 13 percent increase over the same period last year.
And due to the tariffs, firms have announced $1 billion in new spending plans to build or expand U.S. solar panel factories to take advantage of the tax on imports.
Overall, the U.S. solar industry employs more than 250,000 people, or roughly three times more than the coal industry, with 40 percent of those workers in installation and 20 percent in manufacturing, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
But that’s where the good news stops.
The positive numbers for the first part of this year are in fact the result of most installers delaying their 2017 projects until the tariffs were announced. As E&E News noted, modules for installations that came online this year were ordered prior to the tariffs.
Meanwhile, the tariffs have caused U.S. solar companies to cancel or freeze investments totaling more than $2.5 billion in large installation projects, which will cost thousands of jobs and more than offset any economic gains from domestic investment, per Reuters.
Specifically, the negative impact may be felt the most in the Southeast U.S., where the economics of solar were already borderline, according to MJ Shiao at the Wood Mackenzie consulting firm.
But the long-term trends may not be so bleak. Globally, China cut its subsidies and incentives for solar panels in May, presumably in response to the U.S. tariffs. As a result of that policy shift and the decreased deployment in the U.S., global prices have fallen, possibly as much as much as 35 percent.
As a result, the industry has seen record-low power purchase agreements with recent installations. For example, the Central Arizona Project, a municipal water utility, signed a $24.99-per-megawatt-hour contract with AZ Solar 1 earlier this month, which Greentech Media called the cheapest solar contract ever signed. And NV Energy, Nevada’s main utility, announced a deal for a $23.76-per-MWh contract with Eagle Shadow Mountain’s 300-megawatt development.
So the short-term results are mixed and likely to get worse. But as both the tariffs and prices decline, the U.S. industry may hopefully soon find its way out of the temporary hole created by the tariff policy.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez garnered a lot of publicity last month when the 28-year-old self-described “democratic socialist” from the Bronx beat longtime US representative Joe Crowley in the New York primaries. She is practically certain to win a seat in Congress in the general election this November.
While her economic policies have inspired the Democratic base, her advocacy on climate change is noteworthy. Specifically, she’s calling for a “Green New Deal” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition our economy to one based on clean technology, like renewable energy. While she’s not the first politician to make this part of her platform (Jill Stein also tried), she may be the most high-profile at this point.
As E&E News reports [pay-walled]:
“What we are proposing is the complete mobilization of the American workforce to combat climate change and income inequality simultaneously,” Ocasio-Cortez told HuffPost. “The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in the World War II or the Marshall Plan. It will require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs.”
Among the specifics, she wants the U.S. to achieve 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035 and otherwise work to modernize the grid.
From my perspective, this bold advocacy is refreshing. It not only summons the urgency of the need to combat climate change, it transforms the solutions into a jobs and economic development strategy. Those economic benefits are both politically important to inspire regions of the country that need the jobs and also a logical and positive consequence of investing billions of dollars to modernize and clean our energy system, from the electricity to the transportation sectors and beyond.
I hope her advocacy will inspire other elected officials to follow suit. It could be a winning strategy for climate advocates in future elections.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was a conservative justice, yet he occasionally voted with the four more mainstream justices on environmental issues. Presumably, his successor (if confirmed by this Republican-majority senate) will be more conservative. If that’s the case, here are three issue areas where a new Supreme Court could directly affect climate and energy progress:
- Federal Clean Power Plan: Kennedy was the crucial fifth vote on Massachusetts v. EPA, which held that the federal Clean Air Act required U.S. EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant. As a result of that ruling, the Obama Administration eventually proposed the Clean Power Plan, which would have compelled states to reduce carbon emissions from their power sectors. The regulation is tied up in litigation and likely to come before the U.S. Supreme Court. A new court could potentially overrule Massachusetts v EPA entirely or narrow EPA’s authority so much that it’s essentially meaningless. Notably, I believe the latter possibility would have been likely even with Kennedy on the bench.
- California’s waiver authority to regulate emissions beyond federal standards: the federal Clean Air Act allows California to set more aggressive standards than federal ones, provided EPA approves a waiver for the state to do so. Waivers were historically issued almost automatically, until George W. Bush came along and delayed approving one for California’s tailpipe emission standards. Now the Trump Administration is mulling going a step further: revoking previously granted waivers, such as the one to allow California to set tailpipe standards (which were harmonized with strong federal fuel economy standards under Obama, but since reneged on by Trump’s team). The U.S. Supreme Court will likely have to rule on EPA’s authority to revoke existing waivers, if Trump’s EPA chooses that course. The implications would be huge for California’s efforts to boost zero-emission vehicles.
- Regional grid management to promote clean technologies: the federal government has jurisdiction over wholesale power markets that cross state lines. So grid operators that seek to promote clean technologies, like renewable energy, energy storage, or demand response, often need federal agency approval. And the U.S. Supreme Court will occasionally hear cases on appeal. While the scope of these decisions is often narrow, they can affect regional efforts to reduce emissions from the power sector. A new court could potentially seek to undermine these efforts (although as E&E News describes [paywalled], these cases so far have been wonky and not subject to close partisan rulings by the justices).
Other cases could also affect climate policies, such as those involving federal agency regulation of methane emissions from oil-and-gas operations, as well as regulation involving other short-lived climate pollutants (described in E&E news [also paywalled]). But these three loom large for me.
Overall, Kennedy’s retirement is not good news for those who care about environmental protection, as I told the San Francisco Chronicle. But on the flip side, most of the action on climate right now is at the state and local level. Any federal progress will have to come from Congress, not from the courts. And that dynamic is now even more true now with Kennedy’s departure.
Due to work- and vacation-related travel most of this month, I plan to take June off from blogging.
In the meantime, some stories worth following on some of the issues I’ve been covering on this blog:
- Solar PV: Are the Trump solar tariffs actually bringing more solar manufacturing to the U.S.? Or does automation mean it’s just a different location for foreign-owned factories, as I originally suspected? Bloomberg reports.
- Electric vehicles:Tesla addressed Consumer Reports’ concern about braking distance on the new Model 3 with a pretty amazing over-the-air software update. Ars Technica thinks that’s good but also a bit troubling about the quality of the car’s braking system.
- Housing bills in California: SB 828 (Wiener) and AB 2923 (Chiu), two bills I’ve blogged about that will boost housing near transit, both passed their houses of origin. The Real Deal covers SB 828, and Greenbelt Alliance supports AB 2923.
See you in July!
