Pacific Gas and Electric has asked California regulators to approve a plan that would allow the company to sell a minority stake in a newly formed generation subsidiary, with proceeds to be used to fund capital investment projects such as wildfire mitigation and clean energy.
PG&E on Wednesday filed an application with the California Public Utilities Commission for approval to transfer all of its non-nuclear generation assets to a new subsidiary called Pacific Generation, a move that would enable the utility to sell up to 49.9% of equity interests in the division to one or more investors.
“The creation and minority sale of Pacific Generation represent the best path forward for raising equity capital while balancing a variety of important objectives, including meeting PG&E’s near-term capital needs and continuing to provide safe, reliable and affordable service,” PG&E Corp. CFO Chris Foster said in a release posted on the company’s website.
The subsidiary, which would be regulated by the CPUC, would control about 5.6 GW of output, including 62 hydroelectric facilities — and associated reservoirs — with 2,700 MW of capacity; 152 MW of utility-owned solar plants; 1,350 MW of battery and pumped hydro storage; and three natural gas-fired plants rated at a combined 1,400 MW of capacity.
“PG&E would maintain control and majority ownership of Pacific Generation and would use proceeds from the transaction to fund PG&E’s capital investment plans such as wildfire mitigation work, safety and reliability projects, and clean energy investments,” the utility said in its release.
The deal would not involve PG&E’s largest generating asset, the 2.2-GW Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which had been slated for closure in 2025 but will likely get an extended life because of grid reliability concerns in California. (See Diablo Extension Effort Gears up.)
In documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, PG&E said Pacific Generation would be a “standalone” subsidiary with separate management and its own board of directors.
The filing showed the new company would assume a rate base of about $3.5 billion from the transferred assets, representing about 7% of PG&E’s total rate base. The company’s revenue requirement would be set through CPUC general rate-case and cost-of-capital proceedings, and its operations would “be capitalized in line with authorized CPUC capital structure.”
The SEC filing also contended that PG&E customers would benefit from the arrangement because the utility would retain owned generation with no rate impact, and sale proceeds would be invested back into the PG&E system. Existing investors stand to benefit from the sale by gaining an “additional capital source for generation safety and reliability investment” and avoiding a decline in the value of their holdings, the company said.
“PG&E can raise equity through the minority sale that would otherwise need to be raised by the issuance of new common stock, thereby avoiding dilution for shareholders,” company spokesperson Paul Moreno told RTO Insider in an email. “The subsidiary would be subject to rate regulation under the CPUC. There would be no increase in total rates charged to customers and no increase in energy bills.”
PG&E could not say how much it expects to earn from the sale.
“We plan to run a competitive process to maximize value and can’t comment at this stage on expected proceeds. Utility asset valuations in the private sector continue to be very strong, and we expect to capitalize on this dynamic to deliver premium value to our shareholders,” Moreno said.
According to the SEC filing, PG&E plans to file with FERC next month to seek approval for the plan and to transfer its hydroelectric licenses to the new subsidiary. The company plans to launch its sales process in the first quarter of 2023 and expects FERC approval of the hydro license transfers in the first half of the year. That would be followed by an expected CPUC decision in July and a FERC ruling on the investors later in the year. PG&E plans to close the transaction by the end of 2023.
Fall has begun, so the nation’s transmission lines can expect to once again become a target. Specifically those porcelain or glass insulators.
Tony Burt, NERC | NERC
“Insulators on transmission lines are still a very popular target for people out in rural areas with a gun,” NERC’s Tony Burt said during his 2022 physical security overview at the ERO’s 10th Annual Monitoring and Situational Awareness Technical Conference on Sept. 22.
“Usually, about this time of year, we’re going to see an uptick in that,” said Burt, a physical security analyst in NERC’s Bulk Power Situational Awareness group. “There’s really not a lot we can do about it. People are just going to shoot insulators, because they’re a cool target, I guess; show your buddy how far you can shoot or how accurate you are.”
When it does happen, it may show up on a Department of Energy OE-417 report or a NERC EOP-004 filing — along with wayward drones, petty thefts and even protests near bulk electric system (BES) control centers, Burt said.
In 2020, NERC received three reports of physical threats to BES control centers, followed by one in 2021. There were none in the first half of this year, just as there were none in 2019. “Largely, those were due to civil unrest in major metropolitan areas. During that time, there were a lot of protests going on, as you’ll recall. Some of those control centers [were] in downtown areas or in areas where the protests were going on, and the protests might have gotten a little too close,” he said. “No impact to the BES operations, but an event nonetheless.”
BPSA incident reports | NERC
The most prevalent source of reports is also the most prosaic, Burt said.
“The majority of the … reports we see are theft-related; I don’t think I’m going to knock anybody’s socks off with that information,” he said. “You know, whether it be copper theft or construction materials or something that’s been left in a substation, or a catalytic converter ripped out of a vehicle that’s been left in a substation, or tools or anything else that criminals can get their hands on. Largely, when we see events where substation break-ins are taking place, it’s because of theft. That’s just the way it is.”
One new source of reports is drones that have crashed in utility facilities. Burt said it’s hard to tell if the drone operators had “a nefarious intent” or whether it’s just a curious and inexperienced operator.
“I think we really have to remember that we operate things that are pretty cool-looking to people that aren’t in the industry and don’t know about them. … They want to get cool video.”
Such incidents generally result in reports to local law enforcement, Burt said.
“Most times now, entities are getting law enforcement at some level involved in these things, because we don’t know why somebody’s out there taking pictures of a substation, or a power plant, or a transmission corridor or whatever. They may be writing a magazine article; they may be planning some nefarious plot that we’re not currently aware of.
“Back in the beginning of all of the standards … the FBI was the first one everybody wanted to call when something like this happened — because we thought they cared,” Burt recalled. “And over time, and being in different situations, [we realized] the local FBI office always doesn’t know what to do with that, or … as an engineer, they may not even know who the heck you are.”
Geospatial Displays Help Identify Trends
NERC shares physical security data in different forums, including with the regional entities, Burt said. “We’re always looking for trends; we’re always looking for something that we can get in front of, or we can share with people to say, ‘Hey, this is the current threat landscape.’”
To help identify trends, Burt’s group is beginning to use geospatial representations for some events.
“We’ve had instances where we’ve noticed a cluster of like events in different areas. You get different entities together, because, you know, although we can see all the reports, the other entities can’t, and they don’t know that their neighbor may have had similar incidents.”
Without the ability to “get in front of” trends, Burt said, “all of this data is just numbers.”
Warm Weather Miscreants
Although the 2022 data Burt shared ran only through the second quarter, the OE-417 reports included 57 incidents of “damage or destruction to its facility that results from actual or suspected human action” — more than in each of the last three full years.
“But we’re also getting to the time of year when the weather is getting worse,” Burt said. “And for whatever reason, criminals don’t like to go out in bad weather.”
PITTSBURGH — The Biden administration’s commitment to reshaping the nation’s economy by replacing oil and gas with renewable energy, including green hydrogen, was a dominant theme at the Global Clean Energy Action Forum last week.
The three-day, fast-paced conference held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh drew more than 6,000 participants from the U.S. and 31 countries and featured more than 60 energy-focused seminars, programs and discussion panels featuring global experts.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm used the conference to announce that the DOE had finally issued a request for proposal allowing industries and local governments to compete for $7 billion in federal matching grants to develop four to six “hydrogen hubs.”
The hubs will be designed to concentrate clean hydrogen production for use by nearby industries — power plants, steel and cement makers, and fertilizer producers. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, approved by Congress last year, allocated $8 billion for hubs and an another $1.5 billion for associated services.
“We have been doing a lot of work and building that stakeholder coalition and putting together not only the hub piece of it, but all the other parts of the ecosystem that need to accompany that,” said Brett Perlman, CEO of the Center for Houston’s Future, in one of the discussion groups.
The day before Granholm’s announcement, the European Commission approved up to $5.2 billion in public funding to assist in the development of industrial-sized electrolyzers and pipelines. The 28 member nations of the E.U. will contribute to the fund.
A theme that repeatedly emerged in most of the eight hydrogen-focused seminars was that the mass production of electrolyzers, which use electricity to produce hydrogen from water, must be ramped up as quickly as possible if nations are to have any chance of producing the prodigious amounts of green hydrogen that will be necessary to alter the pace of climate change.
The technology was repeatedly described as well understood. While megawatt-sized electrolyzers have never been built, engineers often describe the process of building very large electrolyzers as a “bolt-on” process, suggesting that ramping up in size will not be a problem.
Very few GCEAF participants voiced any doubt that hydrogen could replace conventional fossil fuels in most applications, given enough time. But time is the issue for advocates of clean energy, a mission Granholm crystalized in her pre-conference remarks in a single sentence: “It’s all about pushing, pushing, pushing to deploy, deploy, deploy clean energy solutions.”
John Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate, repeated the oft-quoted line that hydrogen is the Swiss Army knife of energy, meaning it can be substituted for many conventional fuels, assuming the technology to use it has been developed and manufactured — a goal that will require hundreds of billions of dollars in government and private investment.
That includes large gas turbines able to burn 100% hydrogen, an objective that Mitsubishi Power doesn’t think it can achieve in its larger turbines until 2045.
Working the Supply and Demand Sides
The dramatic reduction in carbon emissions that could be achieved by switching from fossil fuel to clean hydrogen — if only in the transportation sector — became clear during one panel discussion.
Natascha Viljoen, CEO of Anglo American Platinum, a mining company with operations in South Africa, made the connection between the electrification of heavy trucking and global carbon pollution.
The company pulled the enormous diesel engine from one of its three-story tall mining dump trucks that are built to haul 315 tons of ore and replaced it with a fuel cell system running on hydrogen produced by electrolyzers using electricity from a 140-MW solar farm.
The conversion of the giant truck from diesel to hydrogen is the equivalent of taking a half million cars off the road, she said.
“We use 40 of these trucks in our fleet,” she added in reference to the platinum mining division. “Across our broader company, we use 400 of these trucks.”
Kurt-Christoph von Knobelsdorff, CEO of NOW GmbH, a consulting company coordinating the German government’s efforts to replace natural gas with hydrogen, noted in one panel discussion that Germany is aiming to completely change its fossil energy system as quickly as possible.
“Hydrogen is so new, and it’s just a tiny bit of the world’s energy mix. If you really want to get it going, you need to work both on the supply and the demand side. It really is a chicken and egg,” he said.
“The idea is that you have to bring supply and demand together. You have to try to do it at scale so that investors can come in. And you have to create visibility over the long term, so that the financial packages can come together as well,” he said.
NOW GmbH has calculated that to produce affordable hydrogen, renewable power prices must be 2 to 2.5 cents/kWh. “We are not very far from that,” he said. The Biden administration has targeted the price of hydrogen at $1/kg by 2030.
“But to do this on a massive scale, industry will have to ramp up the installed global capacity of wind and solar farms, which now represent less than 5% of the power generated globally,” von Knobelsdorff said.
Another theme running through several of the hydrogen seminars was that close international cooperative efforts could speed up development of both hydrogen production and the wind and solar installations needed to support it. Offshore wind was mentioned as a source of the enormous amounts of renewable power that will be necessary to run the still-to-be-mass-produced electrolyzers generating the megatonnage of hydrogen.
Germany and Japan are both developing plans to help companies build solar and wind farms dedicated to producing hydrogen in nations with more sun and wind, and then converting it to ammonia for shipping. Germany has already signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government to import hydrogen produced by still-to-be-built wind farms on Canada’s Atlantic coast. Germany and Australia have issued a joint notice of intent to study the feasibility of creating a hydrogen supply chain.
Moving the hydrogen thousands of miles will require converting it to a “hydrogen carrier,” typically a liquid such as ammonia or ethanol. Ammonia is a chemical familiar to many industries, Shell USA president Gretchen Watkins said in another session.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) withdrew his controversial infrastructure permitting bill from inclusion in the Senate’s must-pass spending bill Tuesday afternoon, conceding he lacked the 60 votes needed for passage.
Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had agreed with President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass permitting legislation before the new fiscal year, Oct. 1.
But Manchin tweeted Tuesday that he had asked Schumer to withdraw the permitting language from the continuing resolution. An initial vote on the measure to fund the government through Dec. 16 cleared the Senate 72-2 later Tuesday.
The package, which would have set a two-year target for the completion of environmental reviews and reduced the time community members have to file legal challenges, had angered both Republicans upset with Manchin’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act and Democrats, who saw it as a concession to the oil and gas industry that would undermine climate efforts. (See Manchin: ‘Awful Lot of Heavy Lifting’ Needed to Pass Permitting Bill.)
Manchin also sought to guarantee permit approvals for the Mountain Valley Pipeline and give FERC enhanced electric transmission siting authority.
Schumer criticized Senate Republicans in a floor speech, saying they “have made clear they will block legislation to fund the government if it includes bipartisan permitting reform, because they’ve chosen to obstruct instead of work in a bipartisan way to achieve something they’ve long claimed they want to do.”
“Because American families should not be subjected to a Republican-manufactured government shutdown, Sen. Manchin has requested, and I have agreed, to move forward and pass the recently filed continuing resolution legislation without the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2022,” he added.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had warned earlier that Republicans would oppose Manchin’s proposal, calling it “permitting reform in name only.”
“What our Democratic colleagues have produced is a phony fig leaf that would actually set back the cause of real permitting reform,” he said.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who was angered by Manchin’s bid to ensure approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline through Virginia and West Virginia, also announced his opposition to the proposal. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had promised to oppose the funding bill if the Manchin proposals were attached.
After the vote on the continuing resolution, Schumer said he and Manchin would “continue to have conversations about the best way” to seek passage of the permitting measure before the end of the year.
Manchin also indicated he would continue to seek support for his proposal. “Over the last several weeks, there has been broad consensus on the urgent need to address our nation’s flawed permitting system. I stand ready to work with my colleagues to move forward on this critical legislation to meet the challenges of delivering affordable reliable energy Americans desperately need,” he said.
Manchin and sympathetic colleagues may seek to attach a version of the permitting legislation to another must-fund bill, the National Defense Authorization Act.
“Extending the negotiations could help the GOP pursue deeper reform by leveraging high energy prices — not just for gasoline, but also for electricity and natural gas — as a pressure tactic,” ClearView Energy Partners said in a note to clients. “If energy prices continue to contribute to inflation as midterm congressional elections approach, Democrat moderates from swing districts could become increasingly vulnerable to GOP attacks against President Biden’s green-leaning energy policy priorities.”
The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday announced $24 million in grants to support the development of next-generation concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) technology, which generates heat for electricity production and industrial processing.
The awards were announced at the International Energy Agency’s Solar Power and Chemical Energy Systems conference, hosted by DOE in Albuquerque, N.M.
Five of the 10 grants focus on industrial uses, furthering the Industrial Heat Shot initiative that DOE laid out earlier this month with a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing operations by 85%, and its roadmap toward decarbonization of the industrial sector. (See DOE Roadmap Tackles Tough Industrial Carbon Emissions.)
Those projects are:
demonstrate a CSP process for decarbonizing the heating of limestone to 950 degrees Celsius, which could reduce the carbon emissions associated with manufacturing cement (Heliogen, Pasadena, Calif., $4.1 million);
optimize heat-transfer processes and designs associated with the production of solar-thermal production of cement (Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., $2.6 million);
develop and test designs of novel molten salt thermal energy storage tanks to enable on-demand delivery of carbon-free heat (Solar Dynamics, Broomfield, Colo., $2.3 million);
design and validate a highly efficient and scalable solar thermochemical reactor to produce hydrogen from water and sunlight (University of Florida, $2.2 million); and
develop a novel chemical reactor to decarbonize the production of propylene, a key precursor to many chemicals (University of Maryland College Park, $2 million).
The other five grants support Gen3 solid particle technology research projects:
deliver a preliminary design of a supercritical carbon-dioxide (sCO2) power block that is optimized for Gen3 CSP that uses solid particles (GE Research, Niskayuna, N.Y., $1.6 million);
develop a novel particle-based thermochemical energy storage system for CSP (Mississippi State University, $3.1 million);
design high-temperature mass flow sensors that use solid particles to move and store thermal energy for the reliable operation of Gen3 CSP systems (Sandia, $1 million);
design a modular slide gate system for control of particle flows in CSP receivers, in collaboration with an industrial valve manufacturer (Sandia, $1.9 million); and
develop a prototype particle-to-sCO2 heat exchanger using advanced design and manufacturing techniques (University of Wisconsin-Madison, $3.1 million).
In a news release, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said: “Solar-thermal technologies provide us with a significant opportunity to upgrade and reduce emissions of industrial plants across the nation while meeting America’s energy needs with reliable, around-the-clock power generation. DOE’s investments will drive the innovation necessary to build out a clean energy economy and meet our climate goals while diversifying the sources of dependable and readily available clean energy.”
Also Tuesday, DOE announced a roadmap developed by its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to guide research and development into heliostats, the mirrors that follow the sun and concentrate sunlight onto receivers to create CSP.
Heliostats now represent 30 to 40% of the cost of a CSP system, and reducing their price tag is important to DOE’s goal of inexpensive CSP plants.
Heliocon — DOE’s Heliostat Consortium, a five-year, $25 million effort led by NREL, Sandia and the Australian Solar Thermal Research Institute — will work to implement the new heliostat roadmap. NREL on Tuesday issued a $3 million request for proposals to expand U.S. expertise in heliostats and increase the number of researchers working in the field.
The Biden administration said Tuesday it has approved electric vehicle charging plans for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico, opening the spigot on $1.5 billion to add chargers over 75,000 miles of highway nationwide.
The $1.5 billion in funding for fiscal years 2022 and 2023 is a down payment on the $5 billion in National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program funding authorized over five years under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Earlier this month, the administration announced it had approved EV infrastructure deployment plans for 35 states and $900 million in IIJA funding. (See FHWA Beats Sept. 30 Deadline for Approving States’ EV Charging Plans.)
For this initial round of funding, states were required to identify “alternative fueling corridors” — major state and interstate highways — where EV charging stations could be located every 50 miles. EVs can fully recharge in about an hour using the fast-charger ports now available.
The IIJA allowed state transportation officials to begin staffing and activities directly related to the development of their charging plans before they were approved.
In addition to reimbursing them for those costs, the federal funding can be spent on a variety of related activities, including upgrading and adding EV charging infrastructure; operation and maintenance costs of charging stations; stakeholder engagement; workforce development; data sharing; and mapping analysis.
The formula used for the allocations is based on states’ gasoline and diesel tax payments into the federal Highway Trust Fund. Ten percent of the NEVI funding will be subject to the discretion of the secretary of transportation to fill gaps in the national network.
The EV charging funding is only one of the ways the Biden administration — which has set a goal that half of all new vehicles sales be zero-emissions vehicles by 2030 — hopes to spur decarbonize transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Department of Energy has $7 billion in funding to help develop a domestic EV battery supply chain. The recently approved Inflation Reduction Act will provide tax credits to purchasers of new and used EVs and $3 billion for expanding EV charging in economically disadvantaged communities.
But the expansion of the charging network may be choppy, as some states have warned federal officials that a lack of grid capacity may slow their plans.
PITTSBURGH — More than 6,000 people from 34 countries came to the Steel City last week for the Global Clean Energy Action Forum, which provided a preview of the national and international climate commitments that will be brought forward at the 27th UN Climate Conference of the Parties (COP27) set for Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, in November.
Here’s some of the highlights of what we heard.
Gates Excited by Federal Funding, Concerned About Reliability
Since Bill Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to help create new technologies and eliminate the “green premium,” it has helped to finance 100 companies.
“The big positive surprise is that when we formed this company that would only invest in things that would have dramatic change for climate, that we had no problem finding those companies,” Gates said in an interview with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. “My biggest fear was we’d raise the money and say, ‘OK, here we go.’ And then people would say, ‘Are you kidding? You want to make steel with no emissions? That just can’t be done.’”
Among its investments are four hydrogen production companies that will take advantage of the tax credits in the new Inflation Reduction Act.
While Gates is excited by what the federal government’s funding will mean for new clean technologies, he worries that many people are underestimating the reliability challenges of the transition to a “green grid” under decarbonization and electrification.
“Based on their weather, geography, latitude … the nature of that clean grid, how you generate power, how you maintain reliability [will vary]. And people are very naive about how hard it is — that in very cold periods you to tend not to have any sun or wind and in very hot periods you tend not to have wind,” he said. “Take just the heating load. If you move that over to electricity to make it zero emission, it is absolutely gigantic. I mean it’s a peak that the electricity system never sees — that kind of a range of non-sheddable demand, because you’re talking about whether people freeze to death or not. …
“Without nuclear, if we try to do this without building a lot of onshore renewables, it’s far more difficult than people think,” he added.
Federal Government Flexes its Spending
The U.S. has begun “moving the needle” on electric vehicle sales in 2022, with EVs representing about 13% of light-duty purchases (excluding the U.S. Postal Service) this year, up from about 1.5% in 2021, said Andrew Mayock, federal chief sustainability officer for the White House.
With a fleet of about 640,000 vehicles, the government turns over about 50,000 vehicles a year, including 30,000 light-duty vehicles.
Speaking at a panel on the role of green procurement in driving decarbonization of heavy industry were, from left, Andrew Mayock, the White House; Nancy Gillis, World Economic Forum; Chris Ward, CDEO of Lehigh Hanson, and Maria Virginia Dundas, Ørsted. | Global Clean Energy Action Forum
The Postal Service represents one-third of the fleet. “And they’ve moved their commitment — just over the past year — from a 10% commitment to a 20% commitment to then announcing a 40% commitment to electrifying the fleet two weeks before the [Inflation Reduction Act] was passed and provided them another $3 billion to accelerate their work,” he said.
Mayock also spoke about the government’s effort to meet President Biden’s pledge to move to carbon-free electricity for all operations by 2030.
He said the federal government — the largest electricity buyer in the U.S. at 54 TWh a year — is taking guidance from the Clean Energy Buyers Association, a group of nearly 300 energy customers and partners committed to reaching a 90% carbon-free U.S. electricity system by 2030.
The group’s members have procured more than 52 GW of new, utility-scale renewable energy since 2014 — almost 40% of the clean energy capacity added over the period.
“We take a look at that playbook … and we’re gonna customize it to our U.S. government perspective and go into the market and demand as a customer clean electricity like our corporate colleagues have,” he said.
Energy Transition as ‘Peace’ Work
Granholm was ubiquitous at the conference, which she said attracted more than 6,000 people from 34 countries. “This is … not about debating targets anymore. It’s about implementation. It’s about results. It’s about action,” she said.
“Vladimir Putin has shown autocrats everywhere that the world’s overreliance on fossil energy can be weaponized against us. And just as he underestimated Ukraine’s ferocious resolve, he underestimated the international community’s commitment and resolve for our clean energy future,” she said. “Now we see that more than just the key to solving climate change, the energy transition — making our nations secure by deploying our own clean energy — could be the great peace project of our time.”
At the forum’s opening reception on Sept. 21, Granholm also answered skeptics, “those who have been saying, ‘Oh, that clean energy economy, that renewable stuff, that just makes things more volatile, less sure.’ … What could be less volatile [than] renewable energy, when you see the prices continually move, but they’re going down. …
“And of course, the volatility of the fossil fuel market across the world now demonstrates … how important this is. It steeled our resolve,” she said.
Innovative Thinking Needed to Reduce Concrete Emissions
Chris Ward, CEO of cement and concrete producer Lehigh Hanson, said efforts to decarbonize the industry are being slowed by reluctance of engineers and others to accept change.
“We’re a cement manufacturer, but we’re also a concrete producer,” he said. “And we deliver a lot of concrete to those construction jobs. …
“The specifiers and engineers have to keep an open mind to new products,” he said. “Oftentimes, a hurdle that we have as a concrete manufacturer is that the specifiers and the engineers don’t want to move off what they’ve always done.”
Ward said two-thirds of the industry’s emissions come from the process itself, not from combustion. “So for us, it’s about infrastructure. It’s about investment. It’s about government policy that will step in and really help us make a step change in what we’re doing and give us the confidence to go out and make some of these step-change mega projects in partnership with the government in order to really drive improvement.”
In the meantime, Ward said, the industry is increasing its transparency. “Within 12 months, you should be able to see exactly what attributes of every cubic meter or cubic yard of concrete that delivers to a construction site, what the global warming potential is of that material,” he said.
Rebirth of US Nuclear Power
Kirsty Gogan, founder and managing partner of London-based TerraPraxis and an adviser to the British government, said nuclear power has a chance of a comeback in the U.S. with the placement of small modular reactors or advanced reactors in properties that were once coal-fired power plants, complete with high-voltage lines to the grid.
“We’re seeing incredible demand for coal-to-nuclear,” she said during a discussion led by the nuclear office of the U.S. Department of Energy. “There’s recognition in these communities about the potential to create a future for decades more of operations and for high-paying jobs. The utilities like it because they want to continue supplying reliable, dispatchable energy without emissions. …
“The question is, how do we do it quickly enough and at the scale needed. We’re working on a new system for repairing [the buildings that housed] coal-fired boilers … using a standardized building designed for manufacturing assembly.”
Last week, the DOE released a report concluding that “hundreds of coal plant sites across the country are eligible and appropriate for potential nuclear power plant sites [and] that 80% of the existing coal plants may be appropriate for this kind of transition,” said Kathryn Huff, assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy at the DOE and a nuclear engineer. “The report also found that using existing buildings and some of the electrical equipment would create significant savings.”
Gogan said the DOE should have little trouble finding former coal plant communities interested in nuclear power. “It’s interesting to see how many communities are already overturning historical moratoriums on nuclear in many, many states around the country.”
The Inflation Reduction Act allocated $250 billion for repurposing fossil fuel infrastructure, Huff said. That could include repairing coal plants, but the applications for that money need to be made by Dec. 31, 2026.
Still up in the air is how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will deal with licensing and training of reactor operators.
GM Revving Up EV Manufacturing to 50% of US Vehicle Sales by 2030
GM chief economist Elaine Buckberg said the company is aiming to sell one million EVs in North America in 2025 and is projecting that by 2030, half of its annual U.S. sales will be electric. The company has committed $750 million to assist in the construction of public charging stations. GM has partnered with Pilot Flying J to build 2,000 fast charging stalls along major highways, all powered by renewable energy. The company is also collaborating with EVGo to build 3,250 charging stations in major metropolitan areas by 2026 and working with its local dealer network to locate another 40,000 public chargers in underserved parts of cities and in rural areas.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $7.5 billion to build out a network of 500,000 EV chargers, which GM supports, she said as an example of how the public benefit (fighting climate change) exceeds the private benefits involved in the federal subsidies to build EV charging stations.
Buckberg’s comments came during a fast-paced panel discussion focused on how to accelerate the replacement of conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles with electric power trains, a transition which several European participants pointed out will reduce the need to import oil and refined products. Not discussed during the conversation was how local utilities will be involved.
A Call to Action
The GCEAF also included meetings of the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), an international consortium started during the Obama administration, and Mission Innovation — both of which were focused on new initiatives and commitments to be carried forward to COP27 in Egypt.
At the CEM’s opening session, Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had triggered “the first true global energy crisis,” but also “a turning point in the history of energy.”
He pointed to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act as a strong reason for optimism. “It is not big news; it is very big news,” Birol said. “When you get the numbers, 400 billion U.S. dollars for clean energy, and it will be multiplied by the private money. In my view, my personal view, it is the single most important action on global energy and climate after Paris 2015,” when the Paris Climate Accord was signed, committing nations around the world to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C.
While hailing the IRA as “an amazing piece of legislation,” U.S. Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry stressed the critical importance of private sector investment.
“No government is going to solve this problem. No government has enough money to be able to solve this problem,” Kerry said, pointing to figures from the UN and IEA estimating that up to $4.5 trillion in clean energy investment per year will be needed over the next three years to reach the world’s climate goals.
“The private sector is the entity that has the trillions of dollars,” he said, but it’s “not deployable. It’s there sort of in asset management hands. But these are going to have to be bankable deals, which means our trade is going to be making more bankable deals faster, and engineering with countries the ability to streamline decision-making, to get the playing field to be one where contracts and decision-making at one-stop-shops and so forth, are available. This can happen.”
‘Mother, May I?’
What will the grid of the future look like, and what will be needed to move beyond today’s interconnection issues?
Speaking at a panel on the grid of the future, Exelon COO Calvin Butler stressed that a clean grid must also be a reliable grid. Utilities are the providers of both first and last resort, Butler said. “You don’t get to this [energy] transition or transformation without us.”
Exelon has a $29 billion capital plan for the next four years, Butler said. “People ask, ‘Is that about reliability or is that about bringing distributed energy resources onto the system?’ The answer is yes,” he said. “Because a more resilient system allows you to have that bidirectional communication, allows your IT systems to talk; it allows the security of the network. You can’t get there without one.”
But Jeff Weiss, CEO of Distributed Sun, a community solar developer based in Washington, D.C., said utilities’ interconnection processes are still slowing the transition.
“Most people doing development and with capital get to the point that they say to the utility, ‘Mother, may I, pretty please, with sugar on top ― I have an opportunity ― may I please touch your grid?’ Generally speaking, the answer is ‘No! Keep your hands off my grid. … I need my grid to work.’”
Still, after working with utilities in 15 states, Weiss believes “there’s actually a good partnership to be had. We get them … to understand that what we’re really doing together — and we can help you through the door too — is the frontline of innovation. This is what the 21st century is all about; it’s about grid upgrades. We need you all to rebuild the transmission grid.”
Conservatives’ vision for a clean energy future includes contributions from natural gas, nuclear and hydrogen; domestic mineral mining; and fewer regulatory hurdles, according to speakers in the online National Clean Energy Week Policy Symposium this week.
At times, politicians’ views contrasted with the industry experts invited to speak at the symposium.
Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) | National Clean Energy Week
Appearing onscreen in front of a painting of an oil well, U.S. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said he hoped that conversations on energy production in an era of climate change continue to be “based on reality and not ideology.”
Armstrong said Europe’s continuing energy crisis shows the importance of U.S. energy independence. He said the U.S. should expand its natural gas infrastructure and shouldn’t be “demonized” for its fracking.
In his message, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) presented an alternate narrative to the one offered by many Democrats and said fossil fuels play an important part in it.
“While Democrats wage a war on our oil and gas producers, we know that America’s a leader in reducing emissions, and that natural gas we produce here at home is cleaner than Russian natural gas,” he said during a Tuesday keynote. “We know the importance of investing in domestic energy and mineral production to maintain energy security and protect our supply chain from China.”
McCarthy thanked Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES) for its advocacy.
“House Republicans prioritize comprehensive permitting reform and elimination of regulations on energy and infrastructure costs that delay projects and increase costs,” he said. “We look forward to partnering with you to achieve these goals.”
Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said Europe’s and California’s recent energy hardships show that “rush-to-green-energy policies” fail citizens. She said the U.S.’ clean energy future should include the reliable output that nuclear energy and clean hydrogen can supply, and that Congress should focus on “responsible, clean, all-of-the-above” energy policies.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), a previous CRES Clean Energy Champion, spoke of improving and retaining the power-generation technology now in use, including nuclear, hydro and natural gas. She spoke of cleaner energy but did not mention climate change, a primary factor driving the push for clean energy.
“This week, Republicans on [the House Energy and Commerce Committee] are celebrating how America has led the world in reducing carbon emissions and promoting innovation by utilizing America’s abundant, clean, affordable and reliable energy,” she said. “Our framework, the Securing Cleaner American Energy Agenda, builds on this legacy to lower energy costs and make our infrastructure and electricity grid more resilient. It includes solutions to unleash innovation for cleaner natural gas, emissions-free hydropower and nuclear power, and carbon-capture technology.”
By contrast, McMorris Rodgers said, the “rush to green” pressed by Democrats will force the energy transition on families and industry, spiking costs, undermining national security and stifling innovation as a result.
“Republicans support a level playing field and a balanced mix of energy resources. As we add more weather-dependent renewables like wind and solar, we must maintain our most reliable baseload power sources,” she said.
Utility executives echoed a need for hydrogen and nuclear output.
Lauren Sher, NextEra Energy’s director of sustainability and environmental policy, said to achieve a steady, 24/7 decarbonized energy supply, utilities will need to rely on zero-emissions fuels like green hydrogen to operate existing generating facilities.
American Public Power Association CEO Joy Ditto said to accomplish big decarbonization goals, her public power producers are enthusiastic about small modular reactors.
“I know you all in California might not want to talk about nuclear, but elsewhere in the country, we really are extremely bullish on smaller modular reactors [and] more affordable nuclear as we move forward, particularly for smaller communities,” Ditto said.
Streamlining Permitting
Panelists agreed that the country’s permitting processes are unwieldy, unnecessarily long and in need of streamlining to keep pace with a necessary transition.
Xan Fishman, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s director of energy policy and carbon management, said on its face, clean energy funding through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) should be enough to jumpstart an energy transition in earnest.
“We’ve got money for innovation; we’ve got money for deployment. It would seem like our clean energy future is right at our fingertips,” Fishman said.
However, Fishman quoted the Aspen Institute’s 2021 “Building Cleaner, Faster” report, which focused on the problem that “achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 is ecologically essential, technologically feasible, economically achievable, but procedurally impossible” given the current permitting environment.
Johnson Controls’ Katie McGinty | National Clean Energy Week
“I wish it were only a bumper sticker. It has the unfortunate characteristic, I think, of being absolutely true,” Johnson Controls’ Katie McGinty said of the problem statement. “The status quo is not solving climate. We have to deliver more environmental protection. Mother Nature is shaking her fist. … Some red tape needs to get cut.”
McGinty invoked the 2,000-plus renewable generation projects in PJM’s interconnection queue that have little chance of coming online quickly because she said the grid remains unprepared.
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), whom CRES announced as one of its 2022 Clean Energy Champions just a day earlier, said the environmental regulations created a half-century ago have morphed into something untenable.
“When the National Environmental Policy Act came out in the late ’60s, it was a really good bill,” Sullivan said. “What’s happened unfortunately is that NEPA has been fully 100% abused, and it’s grown into a law that courts and far-left radical environmental groups use to block essentially everything.”
Sullivan spoke of a gold mine in Alaska that needed 20 years to obtain a permit and said the highway leading to the mine took 30 years to permit.
“This is an issue — permitting reform; the abuse of NEPA — that literally hurts every single American; whether you want to build a wind turbine, or a solar panel, or a highway project, or an airport runway, or a gold mine, or an oil and gas development, it blocks everything,” he said. “We as a country, I believe, are finally starting to wake up to this issue that has bedeviled my state for decades, and we’re starting to take action.”
Despite this, Jeremy Woodrum, senior director of congressional affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), predicted U.S. solar panel manufacturing will soon pick up with “at least” 20 to 25 GW worth of domestic solar panel manufacturing capability. He said SEIA’s goal is to have 50 GW of annual solar energy manufacturing capacity by 2030, two and a half times the total solar capacity installed last year in the U.S.
“We’re looking to go big, and folks who go first are going to reap the rewards,” Woodrum said.
Critical Minerals
Experts agreed that the U.S. must quickly scale up a critical minerals industry and reinforce a supply chain to source a clean energy future.
ClearPath Senior Director Alex Fitzsimmons said critical minerals like nickel, cobalt, lithium and graphite are the “lynchpin” of decarbonized energy production.
Nano One CEO Dan Blondal | National Clean Energy Week
“I think to truly build a domestic supply chain for critical minerals, we need to marshal all the resources we have now in law and policy to three primary goals,” he said, explaining that the U.S. must invest in upstream mining and processing capabilities, invest in recycling facilities and invest in mineral substitutes.
“We have a wall of demand coming for raw material supplies, mining [and] refining, and everything has to happen long before you assemble a battery,” Nano One Materials CEO Dan Blondal agreed.
Blondal predicted central Canada will become a “center of gravity” for battery materials in the North American market. The IRA “put EV tax credits on the line” by mandating that batteries be assembled with environmentally friendly and responsibly sourced materials. He said automakers scrambled to find replacements for Chinese-made batteries to handle near-term demand without jeopardizing tax credit eligibility.
MISOreported on Tuesday that it received a record 171 GW of proposed generation projects from 956 interconnection requests, more than what is currently in the interconnection queue.
The submittals are in addition to the current queue, which numbers 118 GW and 769 projects. Approximately 97% of the new project hopefuls are for renewable or storage resources.
Were MISO to approve all the 2022 requests, there could be nearly 300 GW of projects waiting on studies and interconnection agreements.
MISO said this is the third straight year that queue applications have reached unprecedented levels, with each annual cycle larger than the previous year’s. The RTO received 487 applications for 77 GW last year.
The grid operator said that “the volume of requests reflects an acceleration of the resource transition.”
“At this point, we are experiencing exponential growth in the queue,” Andy Witmeier, director of resource utilization, said in a press release. “The current applications continue to be heavily weighted with renewables and standalone storage requests again tripling the amount submitted the previous year.”
The new queue entrants comprise 84 GW in solar projects, 14 GW in wind generation, 32 GW of standalone energy storage and 34 GW of hybrid projects, or renewable energy and storage facility pairings.
Historically, only about 20% of the proposed generation in MISO’s interconnection queue makes it to grid. If that trend holds, the grid operator could add nearly 60 GW of capacity over the next few years.
However, the RTO’s recently approved long-range transmission portfolio (LRTP) was planned in part to bring more generation online quicker. Staff has estimated that the $10 billion, 18-project portfolio of 345-kV lines can facilitate about 53 GW worth of new interconnections. (See MISO Board Approves $10B in Long-range Tx Projects.)
MISO has plans to recommend three more LRTP portfolios over the next few years, bringing even more clean energy online.
“These numbers continue to represent the seismic shift occurring on the electric grid highlighting a rapid resource transition to renewable energy,” Witmeier said, adding that the first LRTP portfolio and the recent Inflation Reduction Act may have propelled additional interest in new generation projects.
“We are working with our stakeholders on the additional regional transmission needed to accommodate this resource shift,” he said.
The grid operator closed the 2022 application window in mid-September.
MISO said it will share more details on the 2022 queue cycle during the Interconnection Process Working Group’s virtual meeting on Oct. 10.
PITTSBURGH ― In debates over climate change and the urgent need to decarbonize the world’s energy systems, heavy industries ― such as steel, cement and chemicals ― are typically held up as potentially insurmountable obstacles: industries that produce things we can’t live without while generating carbon emissions we can’t live with.
Taking up that challenge was a key theme at last week’s Global Clean Energy Action Forum, where over three days, government and business leaders from 34 countries issued a range of announcements focused on slashing those hardest-to-slash emissions.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm opened the conference Wednesday evening with the rollout of the Department of Energy’s new Industrial Heat Shot, the sixth in its series of “Earthshots” aimed at pushing forward innovation across a spectrum of clean energy technologies. With heavy industry accounting for 30% of direct carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., the initiative is targeting CO2 from the high-heat processes used to transform materials ― like iron into steel – with the goal of an 85% reduction by 2035.
The strategies to be pursued include electrification of heat processes, transitioning to lower-carbon fuels such as hydrogen, geothermal and nuclear, and developing new chemistries and biofuels, according to a DOE press release.
Setting the tone for the conference, Granholm described the Industrial Heat and other DOE Earthshots as audacious and ambitious but achievable, and invited other nations to join the effort, which, she said, “will be the story of the 21st century.”
Granholm followed up the Industrial Heat Shot with Thursday’s release of the funding announcement for the development of regional green hydrogen hubs, which will draw on $7 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Industrial applications, including industrial heat and steel and cement manufacturing, are among the primary targets for the demonstration hubs. (See DOE Opens Solicitation for $7B in Hydrogen Hubs Funding.)
At the GCEAF closing ceremony on Friday, Granholm also announced that pledges from 15 countries and the European Commission will provide $94 billion to be used to fund a rapid acceleration of clean energy demonstration projects globally through 2026. The U.S. kicked off the drive to raise the money with a $21.9 billion contribution in June, after a report from the International Energy Agency estimated $90 billion in clean energy demonstration projects would be needed by 2026 to ensure that essential new technologies can be commercialized and scaled by 2030.
In addition to the U.S., Australia, Canada, the European Commission, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom contributed to the fund.
Another DOE announcement, also released on Friday, highlighted $4.9 billion from the IIJA that will be used to accelerate the commercialization and scaling of carbon capture, transport and storage systems. The money will be spread over three initiatives with the goal of siting, permitting and building carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects capable of storing at least 50 million metric tons of CO2. Funding will also go to CCS demonstration projects that can be easily replicated and deployed at heavy industry facilities and power plants, according to the announcement.
A Carbon Removal Launchpad
Although not an official United Nations event, the GCEAF served as a launching pad for new national and international commitments and actions that will be brought forward at the 27th UN Climate Conference of the Parties (COP27) set for Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, in November.
Thus, the industrial decarbonization announcements at the conference — and the intensive focus on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and green hydrogen — seemed to signal a new level of commitment to these technologies, which still raise skepticism among some environmental and clean energy advocates.
Initiatives advancing both technologies led announcements from Mission Innovation (MI), the international consortium founded in 2015 to accelerate the research and innovation needed to drive widespread deployment of clean energy.
Speaking at a Friday session, Drew Leyburne, Canada’s assistant deputy minister for energy efficiency and technology, reported that MI is “initiating a global push for testing and demonstrating CDR technologies in the lead-up to COP27.”
The six nations in this “Carbon Removal Launchpad” — the U.S., Canada, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Japan and the United Kingdom — will work together “to build and fund pilot-scale and demonstration projects in the CDR space, and to support monitoring and verification efforts to ensure that CO2 is durably stored,” said Leyburne, who also chairs MI’s steering committee.
“It is imperative that we demonstrate the viability of CDR technologies and invest in them in a way that gives the industry the confidence to invest in critical CDR infrastructure, that gives the public confidence in CDR as an essential tool to address climate change, and then ensures that communities receive economic, social and environmental benefits from CDR projects,” he said.
MI also launched a green hydrogen action plan at the conference, but the major announcements — and investments — came from leaders in the steel and iron industries such as Luxembourg’s ArcelorMittal (NYSE:MT) and Australia’s Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG).
Irina Gorbounova reported on ArcelorMittal’s efforts to decarbonize its steelmaking processes with a mix of green hydrogen, renewable energy and “potentially disruptive technologies that can help us accelerate this [work].” The company’s XCarb Innovation Fund, which Gorbounova heads, recently invested $5 million in H2Pro, an Israeli startup pioneering a new approach to green hydrogen electrolysis that could be both cheaper and more efficient than traditional electrolysis.
It has also invested $30 million in LanzaTech, a carbon recycling company, with which it is developing carbon-capture technology at its steel plant in Ghent, Belgium.
Gorbounova sees the role of ArcelorMittal and other heavy industry players as offering entrepreneurs “unique industrial settings … to test their solutions and to establish the technological viability and also industrial scalability.”
Fortescue Metals and its chair Andrew Forrest made headlines last week with its rollout of a $6.2 billion plan to decarbonize its iron ore operations by 2030, followed by a second announcement at GCEAF of a new partnership with the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
The goal for the company’s 10-year, $80 million investment, Forrester said at a small press conference on Thursday, is to help scale and commercialize the innovative technologies developed at the lab, which will then allow more companies to decarbonize.
“With NREL, Fortescue aims to create the world’s leading science and share it with the world so investors like us stop hanging back, stop being concerned that if they commit to a technology and build out a manufacturing system, the [next new] technology will come along and supersede their own new plant,” Forrest said.
“NREL simply gives us the confidence and … will give the world the confidence to really invest and invest aggressively and heavily,” he said.
By 2030, Kurt-Christoph von Knobelsdorff, CEO of German hydrogen and fuel cell company NOW GmbH, also wants to upend heavy industry worldwide with 70 green steel plants, 40 net-zero aluminum factories and 60 zero-carbon ammonia facilities.
But reaching those targets will mean answering some tough questions, von Knobelsdorff told the audience at the MI session on Friday. “How do we change the fuels in those industries?” he said. “How do we get the circularity [of supply chains] working better in these industries? How do we [approach] the efficiency of these industries in a different way? And how do we change fundamental industry processes?”
Echoing Forrester, Leonore Gewessler, Austria’s minister for climate action, environment and energy, stressed the urgency of developing the technologies to cut industrial emissions now. Evoking the climate crisis, she said on Friday, “We cannot wait sector by sector; [there] needs to be combination of industries. … There are 25-year investment cycles in industry, so we need to be there now for every single one of those decisions.”
Calling for radical decarbonization, Gewessler announced that Austria is contributing €250 million to MI’s industrial decarbonization efforts.
“This decade is crucial,” she said. “We need to be smarter and faster,”
