MISO said it will alter some interconnection rules so that generation owners can more easily replace generation at the same point of interconnection or share a single point of interconnection with other owners.
The RTO will remove the requirement that transmission owners must sign off on a shared facilities agreement among interconnection customers, saying there was never a need for transmission owners to be signatories to agreements for shared interconnection facilities.
During a March 1 Planning Advisory Committee, MISO’s Jackson Evans said that after the RTO’s shared network upgrade process was introduced in 2019, multiple disputes arose between interconnection customers and transmission owners over who has ownership rights to interconnection facilities and who would be responsible for their maintenance.
“It almost led to multiple withdrawals” in the interconnection queue, Evans said.
MISO will still require interconnection customers wishing to share interconnection facilities to submit a shared facilities agreement upon filing their request. However, that agreement will no longer be tied to the transmission owners’ interconnection facilities.
Customized Energy Solutions’ Ginger Hodge thanked MISO for the changes and ending a year of “delays, disagreements and frustrations.”
The grid operator said it will prepare a FERC filing for either April or May. The revised process would apply to entrants in the generator interconnection queue’s next cycle
The RTO also said it will make it easier for generation owners to replace units, allowing generators to request longer-term suspension reliability studies with the replacement requests. Previously, the grid operator granted reliability assessments only for the gap period between winding down generator operations at the outgoing unit and the replacement unit’s startup.
MISO added that it will reduce its decision time to approve suspensions for units set to be demolished and replaced. It also said it can shorten a required 26-week notice period to 30 days for generator suspensions in certain replacement situations.
The RTO intends to file the replacement generation process changes with FERC sometime in May.
New York officials on Thursday outlined a schedule to complete a final scoping plan by year-end to reduce economywide greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030 and no less than 85% by midcentury from 1990 levels.
NYCAC Director Sarah Osgood | NYDPS
The Climate Action Council (CAC) in December approved a draft scoping plan that sets the approximate steps needed to achieve the emission limits set by the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).
Based on the discussion that occurred on the draft scoping plan, CAC staff pulled out a few topics on which council members do not concur and additional deliberation is needed, said CAC Director Sarah Osgood.
The council will hold nine, three-hour public comment hearings throughout the state between April 5 and May 11, two of them virtual and the remainder in person, with a mid-June deadline for submitting written comments.
Undefined Terms
Of the terms the council will deliberate, the state’s approach to transitioning the gas system is “of great interest to many of the council members,” Osgood said. “It sounds like we need to determine what New York’s approach to decarbonizing the gas system should look like.”
If council members do not reach “100% agreement” on the topic, Osgood said there is “still plenty of room for additional progress.”
In approving the minutes of the December meeting, Donna L. DeCarolis, president of the National Fuel Gas, said she wanted to repeat her opposition to the council’s adoption of the term “fossil gas” in place of natural gas, noting that the term is not defined by the Public Service Commission or under state law.
Gavin Donohue, president and CEO of the Independent Power Producers of New York, agreed with DeCarolis and asked that their “no” votes be identified by name in the minutes, along with that of Dennis Elsenbeck, president of lithium-ion storage developer Viridi Parente.
Bob Howarth, Cornell University | NYDPS
The CAC voted to apply vote breakdowns consistently throughout the minutes.
The council also will deliberate the potential applications of advanced fuels, including potential regulatory mechanisms, limits or conditions for their use, and the role of research, development and demonstration in these areas, Osgood said.
“Finally, we see room for further progress on carbon pricing policies, potential regulatory mechanisms around funding, the role of private funds and private financing, and how to align markets to help facilitate the needed resources,” Osgood said.
Beyond the cost benefit analysis, issues of how the state will pay for initiatives seem to be absent from the discussion and need to be included, said Bob Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University.
Urgency and Equity
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th assessment report issued on Feb. 28 is focused on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Much like prior IPCC reports, there are calls to action and updated forecasts for the causes and effects of climate change, said Doreen Harris, President and CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
NYSERDA CEO Doreen Harris | NYDPS
“This report also paints a stark picture for humanity, warning that climate change risks are greater than thought,” Harris said. “In fact, the final two sentences of this new report really say it all, and I quote, ‘the scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.’”
This week, the state Department of Environmental Conservation will put out the disadvantaged community criteria and maps, said Commissioner Basil Seggos, who also introduced the DEC’s first deputy commissioner for equity and justice, Adriana Espinoza.
The CAC this year will include advancing the integration of equity throughout the scoping plan and ensuring that it’s central to the council’s decision-making processes, Seggos said.
DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos | NYDPS
As the council approaches the topics set aside for further deliberation, a couple of questions to consider are how equity and justice will be considered and weighted, and what role the Climate Justice Working Group (CJWG) should have in shaping that approach as partners in this work, Espinoza said.
“The group’s meaningful involvement, combined with a robust public input process that we were just discussing will help ensure that the [CLCPA] is informed by priorities of disadvantaged communities, and as concerns from the [CJWG] are representative of concerns expressed by frontline communities, so these concerns must be considered when we deliberate,” Espinoza said.
She reminded the council that the working group “previously shared a lot of really poignant and helpful comments and resources about integrating equity into the council’s work” and that “we can consider reviewing these resources and others during future discussions to ensure that our shared commitment to equity and justice is clear in the final scoping plan.”
A drop in anticipated funding will significantly alter New Hampshire utilities’ plans for their large commercial and industrial energy efficiency programs.
Liberty Utilities, Unitil (NYSE:UTL), Eversource Energy (NYSE:ES) and New Hampshire Electric Cooperative filed a revised 2022-23 energy efficiency program plan on Tuesday to accommodate a 47.5% cut in their originally proposed $287 million budget for the period. The utilities’ large business C&I budget had the biggest decrease across the program offerings, dropping from $88.3 million to $29.4 million.
The NHSaves EE program went into lockdown last November after the Public Utilities Commission rejected the utilities’ proposed 2021-2023 Triennial Energy Efficiency Plan, which would have more than doubled spending. (See NH EE Plan Approaches 2nd Year Without Funding Certainty.)
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu restored funding certainty on Feb. 24 by signing HB549, a bill that establishes funding rules for NHSaves. For this year, the law caps funding at the 2020 level and allows annual increases based on inflation. In addition, the law directed the utilities to file a revised 2022-23 program plan at the new funding level by Tuesday.
The utilities estimated in their revised plan that the large C&I sector program will serve 2,595 customers in 2022-23, which is 2,273 fewer than they expected to serve for the same period under their 2021-23 plan in September 2020. Annual kWh savings for the sector program will decrease by 136.1 million to 56.5 million, while annual Btu savings will decrease by 110.7 million to 135.3.
Offerings for the large C&I segment, which includes energy users with an average annual demand of at least 200 kW or 4,000 Therms, are pared down in the revised plan to incentives only for EE projects. Offerings under the original plan proposal included:
expanding retrofit services;
developing segment-specific services, such as chiller optimization for manufacturing;
exploring opportunities to integrate combined heat and power systems with energy-efficient projects; and
pursuing a codes and standards initiative.
Appeals
In its Nov. 12 order, the PUC said the utilities’ triennial plan was a burden on ratepayers and stood behind its decision to deny the plan, despite requests for rehearing and appeals to the state’s courts.
Legislators moved quickly at the start of the year to send HB549 to the governor, so the PUC is no longer able to change the basic components of the EE program and how it is funded. (See Legislators Step into NH’s Battle over EE Program.)
Passage of the bill means utilities are beginning to reopen programs they had suspended due to funding concerns, Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy NH (CENH), told NetZero Insider.
But the new law does not settle all outstanding issues from the PUC’s order, he said.
On Feb. 7, CENH and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) filed an appeal of the order with the New Hampshire Supreme Court after a Superior Court judge denied an earlier request for a temporary injunction.
The appeal says the commission did not follow the law in its order when, as the petitioners claimed, it essentially “dismantled” the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard, a framework the commission established in 2016. Under the EERS, programs are based on annual savings of kWh or Btu, and a budget is set to meet those annual savings.
Instead of focusing first on savings targets, the PUC’s order focused “solely” on rates and program budget, which “signaled a sharp departure” from the EERS, the appeal said. And the commission, the appeal claimed, failed to give stakeholders a chance to comment on that departure from the standing framework.
“What [HB549] does not do, that a repeal of the PUC’s order would, is re-establish the [EERS] policy framework,” Evans-Brown said. “There’s a symbolic policy discussion that can happen legally over whether the PUC had the right to dismantle the framework without telling anybody that’s what they were planning on doing.”
The state’s utilities and the nonprofit Listen Community Services each filed separate Supreme Court appeals in early February that are substantively similar to the CENH-CLF appeal.
On Feb. 10, the commission reached a settlement with the Office of the Consumer Advocate, which had asked the Supreme Court to stay the commission’s November order. Under the agreement, the OCA said it would withdraw its request and the commission reverted current EE program rates to the 2020 level, which is also what HB549 does.
The new law, however, takes the additional step of tying annual increases to inflation.
ISO-NE will publish the results of its capacity auction next week after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a stay retaining the capacity supply obligation of the Killingly Energy Center.
ISO-NE has also begun plotting out the schedule for next year’s capacity auction, FCA 17, a process which has been delayed as well by the Killingly saga.
In a presentation to the NEPOOL Participants Committee on Thursday, ISO-NE Resource Qualification Manager Alex Rost said that activities for FCA 17 will start in April and that the auction will take place on March 6, 2023, a month later than usual.
The process will be compressed in at least two sections to make up for the lost time, Rost said.
That plan is not final, and ISO-NE said it’s asking market participants for feedback before it publishes the schedule.
Financial Assurance Proposal Update
Also at Thursday’s Participants Committee meeting, Competitive Power Ventures delayed a vote on its proposal to revamp New England’s financial assurance rules, adding new penalties for developers who miss key milestones. (See NE Stakeholders Propose Retirement, Financial Assurance Changes.)
The proposal, which has been discussed at several NEPOOL stakeholder meetings in the last few months, recently came under criticism from the renewable energy advocacy group RENEW Northeast.
RENEW wrote in a memo that the changes call for “excessive levels of Financial Assurance that would create an unnecessarily high burden for new entry, beyond what would be needed to incent the proper behavior.”
The group said it’s not opposed to increasing the required FA before each capacity auction, but that level should be a “careful balance” that doesn’t create overly punitive barriers for entry.
RENEW also challenged some of the language in CPV’s proposal as unclear. CPV is expected to revisit the proposal in other NEPOOL meetings over the next few weeks.
Consent Agenda
The committee also unanimously approved revisions to Planning Procedure No. 11 (Planning Procedure to Support Geomagnetic Disturbances) to conform to and support the requirements of NERC Reliability Standard TPL-007-4 (Transmission System Planned Performance for Geomagnetic Disturbance Events), as recommended by the Reliability Committee at its Feb. 15 meeting.
Staff from WECC and the Texas Reliability Entity said Thursday that repeated disturbances involving distributed energy resources (DER) in recent years show that integrating distributed energy resources into the bulk power system will take close coordination between NERC, the regional entities and industry.
The staff members were speaking at a Texas RE webinar to discuss last year’s Odessa disturbance. During the event, which occurred May 9, a fault in a combined cycle power plant near Odessa, Texas, caused nearly 20 solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind facilities, some as far as 200 miles away, to suffer reduced voltage.
NERC and Texas RE last September released a report on the event that concluded the power industry is not moving fast enough to implement NERC’s reliability guidelines, while also urging FERC and the ERO to add binding requirements related to reporting and correction of performance abnormalities. (See NERC-ERCOT Report Reviews Texas Solar Issues.)
Steve Ashbaker, WECC | Texas RE
Thursday’s webinar compared the Odessa disturbance to recent incidents in the Western Interconnection, also involving performance drops by solar and wind facilities, to emphasize that the issue is not limited to one region.
Steve Ashbaker, WECC’s reliability initiatives director, said that just in the last year, the West has dealt with four events involving disruption to power output from DERs: the Victorville disturbance on June 24; Tumbleweed on July 4; Windhub on July 28; and the Lytle Creek Fire on Aug. 25. This is the same number of events seen in the previous five years, indicating a significant increase.
James Hanson of WECC’s event analysis department pointed out that the rise in disturbances parallels the penetration of DERs, particularly solar panels, in the Western Interconnection. Generation interconnect requests for solar power have risen from a bit more than 10,000 in winter of 2016 to nearly 100,000 in summer 2021. This trend represents a growing “reliance” on solar power in the interconnection, Hanson said, which means system planners need to be aware of the unique characteristics of DERs, which have contributed to these incidents.
Older Plants Lack Flexibility
The most important factor is not the recently installed plants but the older ones, which have been involved in multiple events. The reason, he said, is that these veteran plants do not incorporate the technology controls that allow greater flexibility in newer facilities.
“We have some legacy plants here that have inverters that are eight to 10 years old, and … their settings can’t be altered, so you can’t disable the momentary cessation settings … as the newer, modern technology can be disabled,” Hanson said.
Ashbaker also pointed out that the “data resolution” provided by many inverters is low due to infrequent sampling; many plants have equipment that records data only every five minutes, even though faults can be cleared in as little as 50 milliseconds. This denies investigators the information they need to determine the cause of incidents and recommend actions to fix the underlying issues.
Mark Henry, Texas RE | Texas RE
Another common issue pointed out by Mark Henry, Texas RE’s director of reliability services, is the lack of accurate models for DERs and other “weak areas in the grid” that leave grid operators with little idea what to expect in the event of a problem.
“We want to be able to understand the characteristics of this equipment,” Henry said. “We’d like the equipment all to perform fully within expected specs, but we also understand that inverter-based resources are different than the synchronous generation that we’re more used to. And it turns out that we’ve got to have very sophisticated models that use electromagnetic transient analysis. … When I started my career, that was a very rare thing to see that sort of analysis. Now it’s becoming more routine.”
The presenters reiterated the earlier report’s calls for utilities to follow the recommendations of NERC and their regional entities but went further by urging listeners to volunteer for the groups in those organizations working to set those guidelines. They emphasized that equipment manufacturers, regulators and registered entities need to hear from each other in order to manage the system properly.
“We have abundant opportunities for dialogue between all the parties involved with this, and we expect to see more of that. We expect that NERC will have a very active role with their staff and engaging the different people who are involved,” Henry said. “There’s a lot of work that has to be done, and everyone can expect that we will be reaching out to engage on these things … to a higher degree.”
In 2021, the U.S. pulled in $105 billion in capital investments in the clean energy transition, installed 37 GW of new wind and solar, along with 42 MW of battery storage, and put 657,000 new electric vehicles on the road, more than double the 325,000 EVs sold in 2020.
At the same time, according to the 2022 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rose 5.8% year over year, and climate disasters cost the country $145 billion in damages. Meanwhile, high natural gas prices opened the way for coal-fired generation to once again become competitive in wholesale power markets. Coal produced 22% of the nation’s electricity in 2021, the highest level in 14 years, the Factbook says.
A joint project of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) and BloombergNEF (BNEF), the 2022 Factbook was one of two major energy industry reports released Thursday, with each providing different and somewhat conflicting views of the U.S. energy transition.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2022 reported that fossil fuels will continue to dominate through the middle of the century even as renewables and electric vehicles ramp up.
“We don’t see liquid fuels and natural gas losing their place as the top two sources of energy in the United States through 2050,” said EIA acting administrator Stephen Nalley during an announcement webinar.
The 2022 Factbook provides a chart-packed, by-the-numbers look at a U.S. and global clean energy transition that has become unstoppable but still faces many uncertainties as to its speed, costs and evolving portfolio of technologies and fuel sources.
A key chart in the report compares the $80 billion in energy research and development funding — mostly for nuclear, hydrogen and carbon capture — in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act with the $300 billion in incentives and tax credits for renewables, storage, transmission and manufacturing in the stalled Build Back Better Act.
“We need every technology that we can bring to bear, and we need them to be affordable, deployable and practical” to reach economy-wide decarbonization, BCSE President Lisa Jacobson said in an interview with RTO Insider. “Investments are needed in many innovative technologies, in addition to dramatically scaling up what we have readily available today.”
At a prerelease press briefing on Thursday, other energy industry officials spoke of the need to ramp up investments, deployments and the policies that will support them. Dan Whitten, vice president of public affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), said solar deployments could drop in 2022 “if we don’t get this right.”
SEIA is particularly focused on the tax credits for manufacturing in Build Back Better, which he said are “critical, both in terms of investing in facilities and also in supporting production of everything from ingots to cells to wafers to panels themselves. We’ve got make that commitment.”
Records for Venture Capital
For Ethan Zindler, head of Americas for BNEF, one of the report’s biggest takeaways is the growth in investment and renewables deployment in 2021, which he called “a truly blockbuster of a year.”
“In the flows of capital, almost every type of asset class or way that money could get deployed into the sector, it did,” Zindler said. “We saw records for venture capital investment. It was everything from early-stage technologies to deployment of existing and commercially viable technologies … which reflected a lot of bullish sentiment on the part of investors.”
<img src="https://rtowww.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/140620231686782058.jpeg" data-first-key="caption" data-second-key="credit" data-caption="Renewables accounted for about 45% of the $105 billion invested in U.S. clean energy assets last year, with EVs not far behind at 34% of the total.” data-credit=”BloombergNEF” data-id=”6152″ style=”display: block; float: none; vertical-align: top; margin: 5px auto; text-align: right; width: 500px;” alt=”Clean energy assets (BloombergNEF) Content.jpg” data-uuid=”YTAtODQ1MjE=” align=”right”>Renewables accounted for about 45% of the $105 billion invested in U.S. clean energy assets last year, with EVs not far behind at 34% of the total. | BloombergNEF
Renewables took the largest chunk of new U.S. investment, $47 billion (45%), followed by electric transportation at $35 billion (34%), he said. And investment in hydrogen doubled to $200 million.
Paralleling those investments, the solar industry added 24 GW of new power to the grid and wind added 13 GW, helping to push renewables’ contribution to U.S. power generation — including hydropower — to a new high of 21%.
Transmission also saw record-breaking investments from both utilities and independent developers, close to $28 billion, an 11% increase from 2020, according to the factbook. But, despite the hundreds of gigawatts of renewable energy projects in interconnection queues across the country, BNEF is predicting a slight downtick and plateau in coming years.
Transmission investments jumped 11% to $27.5 billion in 2021. | EEI
“I don’t think the issue is the lack of available capital,” Zindler said. “The challenge is lack of investible projects … [caused by] the incredible challenge it takes to get a transmission project permitted.”
Emily Duncan, director of federal government relations for National Grid and BCSE board chair, pointed to the indefinite hold on construction of the $1 billion Hydro-Quebec transmission line following a 2021 vote by Maine voters against the project.
“We’re living that right now,” Duncan said. The uncertain fate of the project “is a perfect example of just how important this transmission problem really is — the fact that we are going to have to run transmission through states that may not directly benefit from it. And how do we square that moving forward?”
Cost of Renewables Matters
Offering a more cautious view of the energy transition, EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook begins with the premise that meeting global demand for cheap power will keep fossil fuels a growth industry in the U.S. Oil and gas production will continue to boom, hanging on to their top spots as the two biggest sources of energy in the U.S. through 2050, despite increasingly high rates of renewable energy growth, the report says.
“We see the United States continuing to produce record amounts of crude oil, natural gas and natural gas plant liquids through 2050 under a wide variety of assumptions examined in the reference case and side cases,” Nalley said.
Driving that trend is a nearly 50% baseline increase in global energy consumption between now and 2050, bringing with it hefty international demand for oil and gas.
Corporate procurement of renewable energy is expected to add hundreds of terrawatt-hours of new renewable energy to the grid by 2030. | BloombergNEF, The Climate Group, company announcements
On the emissions front, the report’s look at a number of scenarios — a reference case and eight “side cases” — finding that the ongoing energy transition decreases emissions until 2037, but then they begin to gradually tick upward again. EIA assistant administrator Angelina LaRose said the upward trend reflects “an increase in overall energy usage as a result of increasing population and economic growth,” as well as assumptions about current laws and regulations holding in place.
The share of renewables in the U.S. electricity generation mix more than doubles from 2021 to 2050 according to the outlook, with wind leading the way in the next few years and solar taking over after 2024. By 2050, the EIA sees solar at 22% of electricity generation and wind at 14%.
“The cost of renewables matters,” LaRose said. In one of the agency’s side cases, with low renewable costs, gas and nuclear generation fall compared to the reference case. In another, with renewables remaining at today’s costs, solar and wind still grow but gas prices remain competitive, and all of the energy sources keep growing.
“In the absence of changes in policy, the market is primarily driven by cost,” LaRose said. “There’s the potential for much variation.”
A ramp-up in electric vehicle sales, from 340,000 in 2021 to 1.52 million in 2050, starts to put a dent in the share of gasoline-powered vehicles in the reference case, which fall from 92% of light-duty vehicles in 2021 to 79% in 2050.
“There are a number of factors, including declining battery costs,” said Erin Boedecker, EIA’s team leader for energy consumption and efficiency modeling. “Also, an increasing number of available models on the market, and that’s expected to continue. And there’s a growth in the consumer market for longer-ranged electric vehicles, particularly in light trucks, in our projection period.”
WASHINGTON — FERC Chairman Richard Glick told Congress Thursday he has no regrets over the natural gas policy statements a split commission issued last month, rejecting criticism that he had overstepped the agency’s authority and increased uncertainty for developers.
FERC voted 3-2 along party lines on Feb. 17 to update its 1999 policy statement on natural gas infrastructure certificates (PL18-1) and release guidance on how it will evaluate the impacts of projects’ greenhouse gas emissions in its environmental analyses (PL21-3). (See Split FERC Updates Policies on Gas Infrastructure Applications.)
Glick defended the policy statements during a two-hour hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where Chairman Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and his Republican colleagues accused FERC’s Democratic members of pursuing a partisan climate agenda that undermined U.S. energy security.
Glick and his fellow Democratic commissioners, Allison Clements and Willie Phillips, said the statements were needed because projects have been remanded or vacated by federal courts because of insufficient environmental analyses by regulators, including FERC.
‘Beyond the Pale’
An angry Manchin opened the hearing by accusing FERC’s Democrats of “elevat[ing] environmental considerations above American energy reliability, security and independence.” After the hearing, Manchin joined Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate to announce a bill that would bar the importation of Russian crude oil, petroleum products, LNG and coal until the country ends its invasion of Ukraine.
“To … put up barriers to natural gas projects and the benefits they provide, while Putin is actively and effectively using energy as an economic and political weapon against our allies is just beyond the pale,” Manchin said. “If we could actually get natural gas infrastructure built it would not only help with the energy transition, here at home that would also help keep costs down for American families, create good-paying jobs, and strengthen our ability to use energy as a geopolitical tool to fight for our values abroad and support our strategic partners.”
Republicans followed with their own fusillade, with Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) accusing the FERC of “kneecapping energy providers,” and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) saying the commission was pursuing a “radical climate agenda [that] makes us more vulnerable to attack.”
“These policies are going to make it next to impossible to build any new natural gas infrastructure or upgrade our existing facilities in the United States,” said ranking member Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.). “These orders were among the chief objectives of Commissioner [Allison] Clements’ former employer, a group with a mission to block pipelines.” Clements worked for a decade at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Republican commissioners James Danly and Mark Christie, who had dissented on the policy statements, also were critical.
Danly said the majority put “far too much weight on a handful” of narrow court rulings and said the new policy would cause reliability problems for the electric grid.
Christie said he would have agreed to reduce the reliance on precedent agreements between corporate affiliates to prove the need for pipeline capacity and to measures guaranteeing due process to property owners and communities.
“On the contrary, what the majority did was essentially assume it had the power to rewrite both the Natural Gas Act (NGA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) under the rubric of addressing climate change,” he said. “But that is a power that this commission does not have; only you — the elected legislators in Congress — have that power and you have not delegated that power to us.”
Glick: No Agenda
Glick said the majority made its decisions “based solely on the applicable law and the facts in the record,” insisting, “I have no other agenda.”
“The D.C. Circuit has spoken on several occasions, and unless the court’s interpretation is reversed, we have no choice but to follow with unambiguous guidance,” he said.
The commission received defenses from the panel’s Democrats and Independent Sen. Angus King (I-Maine).
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said it was “outrageous” that the commission had relied on contracts between corporate affiliates.
King recalled having to comply with environmental regulations while seeking a permit for a 2 MW hydropower project. “We had to do environmental analysis of wetlands; we had to work with U.S. Fish and Wildlife; we had to look at the effects on the water surrounding the project and fish passage and all of those issues,” he said. “And here we are saying that the FERC can’t require the examination of the most serious environmental threat that this country and world has ever faced — I think that’s preposterous.”
King said critics had made a case for FERC to work with stakeholders to clarify the order and reduce uncertainty. But, he added, “the fundamental premise is that this is an environmental impact. Methane is 80 times worse than CO2. And it’s the low hanging fruit of climate change.”
More or Less Uncertainty?
Glick said he was confident that the policy statements “will lead to project orders that are more legally durable.
“I think developers of energy infrastructure would agree that when regulatory agencies ignore judicial directives, or cut corners, the courts typically vacate permits and send the agencies back to the drawing board. This often adds a significant amount of time and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of additional costs onto a project.”
But Republicans said the commission’s actions would increase litigation and chill investments, with Barrasso citing a letter of complaint from Alan Armstrong, CEO of Williams Co., which transports about 30% of the natural gas in the U.S.
“There is no question that it will be wielded against every major natural gas project, future or pending, making the costs and uncertainties of even pursuing a project exponentially more daunting,” said Christie.
He said the majority was disingenuous in suggesting the statements were consistent with the commission’s prior handling of environmental impact analyses. “To compare drainage mitigation going through a wetland to ‘Oh, you’ve got to mitigate global climate change … that is a massive, massive step difference.”
Christie said he was certain that some licenses will be approved under the new policy but said they represented a “Potemkin Village.”
“I think what we’re going to see is the deterrent factor is so great, I think you’re going to see a lot of applications that are never going to get even proposed. And maybe that’s the point. Because who can raise $6 to $8 billion of risk capital based upon a standard that says, ‘try your luck.’”
Under questioning from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Glick said the new policy would only require developers to mitigate fugitive gases associated with the pipeline’s construction and operation. But Danly said the statement goes far beyond that in “encouraging” mitigation of downstream emissions.
“It is, in my opinion, a classic case of doing indirectly what cannot be done directly,” Danly said. “The general premise in this shows you my judicial minimalist streak: Every time you get a multi-factor balancing test that is going to be done on a case-by-case basis by an administrative agency, what you effectively have is derogation of power to pick winners and losers at the whim of the decision maker. And that will be the case here, where I predict that you’re going to see favored parties being given the nod and those who aren’t will have their applications rejected.”
Looking Forward
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) said the issues raised by the pipeline debate are “similar to the issues we’re facing around [electric] transmission.
“Maybe it’s time that we get around the table and just discuss the legislative solution to gas and transmission at the same time,” he said, “because we really are running out of time” to address climate change.
Barrasso suggested Congress could seek to undo the policy under the Congressional Review Act.
“I’m now starting to think that perhaps we would be better off without FERC — which having been created by Congress, can be eliminated by Congress,” said Lee. “Perhaps it should.”
In an interview after the hearing, Glick said he had no regrets about how the commission issued the policy statements. “We have to move. These orders are sitting here,” he said.
“As I said before, give us some time. Let us pursue these orders. … And if you still don’t like it, call me back and scream at me some more. I’m going to take it, but at least see how we implement the policy statements.”
A newly appointed tribal representative to the California Air Resources Board’s environmental justice committee has questioned whether the timeline for the board’s climate change scoping plan gives her enough time to have a meaningful impact.
Jill Sherman-Warne is the first Native American tribal member appointed to CARB’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (EJAC).
CARB convened the EJAC in May to make recommendations on the agency’s 2022 scoping plan, a roadmap to achieving the state’s greenhouse gas reduction goals. Other EJAC members were added in August.
Sherman-Warne joins the committee just months before CARB expects to release a draft version of the scoping plan in May. Adoption of a final plan is expected by the end of this year.
“This process is happening so compressed for me that I’m concerned about really having true tribal engagement,” Sherman-Warne said Monday during her first EJAC meeting.
Sherman-Warne is executive director of the Native American Environmental Protection Coalition and an enrolled member of the Hoopa Tribe in Northern California. She referenced the challenge of working with all 109 tribes in California.
“I do want to do everything I can to ensure that they’re engaged, or at least have some knowledge about the process,” Sherman-Warne said during Monday’s meeting. “The timeline’s a big concern for me.”
Extension Denied
The scoping plan timeline is an issue that EJAC members have raised before. It’s possible the topic will be discussed during a joint meeting of the CARB board and the EJAC on March 10.
In October, the EJAC sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, asking for a six-month extension to the scoping plan schedule to give committee members more time to meaningfully engage with communities they represent. The members represent low-income communities and communities of color that have significant exposure to air pollution.
AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, requires CARB to update the scoping plan every five years. The last update was in 2017. But the EJAC noted in its letter that the law allows the governor to extend the deadline “in the event of extraordinary circumstances.” (See EJ Committee Seeks Extension on CARB GHG Scoping Plan.)
CARB Chair Liane Randolph responded to the EJAC letter on behalf of Newsom, rejecting the committee’s request for more time.
“Gov. Newsom has charged CARB with completing the plan as quickly as possible, in line with what the climate crisis demands,” Randolph said in a letter to EJAC.
The scoping plan will identify strategies needed to meet GHG-reduction goals, and getting started on those strategies as soon as possible is critical, Randolph said.
And strategy implementation is an area where the EJAC can play a role, she added. Randolph has committed to keeping the EJAC going on a permanent basis, not just during scoping plan development.
“My commitment to continuing active engagement with the EJAC following adoption of the scoping plan presents an important opportunity for the EJAC to advise on the implementation of climate change policy, which is where the benefits intersect with communities,” Randolph wrote.
Concerns Remain
EJAC members have indicated in recent meetings that they’re still not comfortable with the timeline.
“We’ve been working at a breakneck speed to keep up with the pace of the scoping plan and to be able to engage in a meaningful way,” EJAC co-chair Martha Dina Arguello said during a CARB board meeting last month.
Arguello said the issue is two-fold. The timeline makes it difficult for EJAC members to be meaningfully engaged in the scoping plan development, she said, and it leaves little time to gather feedback from impacted communities. Arguello is executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility — Los Angeles.
Also during the board meeting, EJAC member Kevin Hamilton described the committee’s first community engagement meeting, which took place last month with San Joaquin Valley residents.
Organizers expected about 50 attendees, but the meeting instead drew about 180 participants, overwhelming the Zoom platform, he said. Participants listened until the end of the session and brought many questions and concerns.
“[It] lets me know that if we did this across California, we might hear a very different story than one that we’re hearing at the Capitol,” Hamilton said. “And we need to act and make sure those voices are not only heard, but their concerns acted upon.”
Hamilton is co-director and co-founder of the Central California Asthma Collaborative.
During Monday’s EJAC meeting, Matt Holmes proposed taking the issue directly to the CARB board.
“We need to request that the board vote at the March 10 meeting for an extension of the timeline, if they want to have a fully informed and meaningful EJAC set of recommendations,” Holmes said. He is an environmental justice outreach coordinator for Little Manila Rising and represents the organization in the committee.
Recruitment Challenges
Before Sherman-Warne joined the EJAC, CARB struggled to find a tribal representative for the committee.
The agency’s April 2021 solicitation for EJAC members was sent to a tribal email list, but received no responses from tribal representatives, according to a CARB memo in September.
CARB contacted a member of the legislature for possible referrals and worked with other state agencies on finding a tribal representative. The California Environmental Protection Agency shared the request several times with its Tribal Advisory Committee. EJAC members helped in the search as well.
Tribes contacted directly said they didn’t have time or resources to provide an EJAC representative.
The Strategic Growth Council, a state government committee that works on sustainability and equity issues, also got involved.
One of the council’s recommendations was to explain how the time and effort from the tribal representative would be reflected in the scoping plan update.
“It’s best to ensure that tribes understand the level of integration, especially since tribes are sovereign nations,” SGC said, according to CARB’s memo.
A bill that would have set a goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 has failed in the New Mexico Legislature, but proponents expect some version of the proposal to return next year.
State lawmakers also rejected a proposed low-carbon fuel standard and a hydrogen hub development act during the 2022 session, which ended on Feb. 17.
The state legislature holds a 30-day session in even-numbered years to focus on the budget, as well as bills in priority areas identified by the governor.
During a climate conference in October, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham committed to backing net-zero legislation, a hydrogen hub act and a clean-fuel standard in the 2022 session.
Rep. Nathan Small (D) introduced the net-zero proposal (HB6, also known as the Clean Future Act), which would have mandated a reduction in statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 50% of 2005 levels by 2030. The reduction would have been in “direct” emissions, without the use of offsets.
By 2050, the bill would have required a 90% reduction in direct GHG emissions with remaining emissions “at least matched” with offsets “generated by biological, technological, chemical, or geologic means” to achieve at least net-zero emissions.
The bill stalled after the House Government, Elections and Indian Affairs Committee voted on Feb. 11 to recommend a substitution for HB6.
The Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter called the Clean Future Act’s failure a “disappointing outcome.” In a release, the group said the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association spent more than $256,000 on advertising against the bill in the final weeks of the legislative session.
Chapter Director Camilla Feibelman said previously that the proposal’s 50% direct reduction in GHG emissions by 2030 would be more ambitious than the 45% reduction that the governor set as a 2030 target in 2019. (See New Mexico Draft Bill Targets Net Zero by 2050.)
Alex DeGolia, director of state legislative and regulatory affairs for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the group plans to build on the momentum generated for the Clean Future Act during this year’s session to pursue similar legislation in 2023. Next year, state lawmakers will meet for a 60-day, rather than 30-day, session.
DeGolia said the 2030 target of cutting GHG emissions by half is particularly important. “Action sooner than later is essential.”
Clean-Fuel Bill Dies
Environmental groups were also disappointed with the failure of Sen. Mimi Stewart’s (D) SB14, the proposed Clean Fuel Standard Act, which would have directed the state Environmental Improvement Board to adopt rules to decrease the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. It would have created a system of credits that fuel producers could use to meet annual targets.
The bill said New Mexico could coordinate with states that have adopted a similar standard, such as California.
The Democrat-controlled Senate passed the bill on a 25-16 vote, but it died on a 33-33 vote on the last day of the session in the House, which Democrats control 45-24-1.
Hydrogen Controversy
Another bill that failed was HB4, the Hydrogen Hub Development Act introduced by Rep. Patricia Lundstrom (D). The bill would have established grant and loan programs for hydrogen hub projects, offered tax incentives for developing hydrogen facilities and authorized public-private partnerships.
The House Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee tabled HB4 on a 6-4 vote. But the proposal resurfaced when Lundstrom incorporated a revised version of the measure into a generic bill, HB227, the Albuquerque Journal reported. The bill was referred to the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, which Lundstrom chairs.
House Speaker Brian Egolf (D) reportedly pulled HB227 from committee, and the bill died.
The hydrogen bills had faced criticism from groups, including Pueblo Action Alliance and Youth United for Climate Crisis Action, which said the proposals “prioritize[d] investments in a fossil-fuel based technology to secure fossil fuel interests.”
“Hydrogen is not a ‘clean’ energy nor is it renewable,” the groups said in a release. “Hydrogen production is resource intensive and would impact our water resources.”
Lujan Grisham hasn’t abandoned the idea of New Mexico as a hydrogen hub, however. Last week, she joined the governors of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming in announcing that the four states would team up to develop a Western Inter-States Hydrogen Hub with facilities in each state. (See Mountain States Partner to Secure Hydrogen Hub.)
Efficiency Program Approved
Lujan Grisham did get to sign one bill, HB37, legislation creating a community energy efficiency block grant program in the state’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. The bill passed the House 44-24 and the Senate 26-14.
HB37 is intended to reduce the energy burdens faced by low-income residents. People living below the poverty line spend 15% of their income on average to pay their energy bills, according to the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP), which supported the bill.
Lawmakers approved a $10 million appropriation to the program.
“It’s wonderful to see prioritization of resources to help low-income New Mexicans reduce their energy burdens while creating good-paying local jobs and fighting climate change,” Tammy Fiebelkorn, SWEEP’s New Mexico representative, said in a statement.
New Jersey’s first offshore wind project, Ocean Wind, has encountered its most public challenge as it seeks an easement from the tourist town of Ocean City to run cables, buried three feet underground, to an inland substation. Thus far, the town appears to oppose the easement, and the project developer Ørsted has asked the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) to step into the fray to approve the easement regardless of the town’s wishes in the matter.
The BPU recently agreed to hear the case and selected Chair Joseph L. Fiordaliso to oversee and rule on the issue.
The case is the first test of a new law, S3926, passed in July 2021, that allows for the siting, construction and operation of “wires, conduits, lines, and associated infrastructure” on public land if needed to connect an offshore wind project to the grid, despite any opposition from local authorities as long as they are consulted. The bill stipulates that the connecting infrastructure should be buried underground. (See NJ Lawmakers Back Offshore Wind Bills.)
Before the 5-0 BPU vote agreeing to hear the petition, Commissioner Upendra J. Chivukula acknowledged the potentially groundbreaking decision facing the agency as it evaluates Ørsted’s request to secure the easement rights. “This is a new precedent, and we are getting into areas where the board has not been before,” he said.
Ocean City officials did not respond to NetZero Insider emails and a phone call seeking comment.
In its petition, Ørsted asked the board to rule that Ocean Wind meets the requirements of S3926 and can therefore move ahead with siting the cables on the proposed route without the town’s approval.
The company is seeking a 30-foot-wide easement running the length of the island, which is about eight miles long, for a 275-kV cable that will connect Ocean Wind’s turbines, about 15 miles offshore, to the PJM grid at a substation at a now closed coal-fired power plant in neighboring Upper Township.
In its petition and related affidavits, Ørsted said it has held multiple public hearings to explain the project and has also had numerous meetings with Ocean City officials but has yet to secure the municipality’s agreement on the easements. The developer argues that it needs the easements to keep the project on track and meet its commitment to the BPU that the first phase of the project’s commercial operation would start May 1, 2024.
‘No Room’ for Cables
Approved in 2019, the 1,100 MW Ocean Wind project is the first of three offshore wind farms given the green light by the BPU, and as the first, its ability to overcome permitting and other obstacles may carve a path forward that will inform and shape succeeding offshore wind projects.
Aside from Ocean Wind, the BPU has awarded leases to the 1,148 MW Ocean Wind II, also an Ørsted project, with 25% held by PSEG Renewables Generation, and Atlantic Shores, a 1,510 MW joint venture between EDF Renewables North America and Shell New Energies US. The state expects to hold at least three more solicitations with a goal of deploying 7,500 MW of offshore wind capacity by 2035.
Orsted has asked the New Jersey BPU to approve an easement running through the small coastal community of Ocean City, which will allow it to connect its offshore wind project to the grid. | Ørsted
Public sentiment about the Ocean Wind easement will be aired Monday when Ørsted holds an online public hearing focused on its proposal to run the cable under land that was improved under the state’s Green Acres program, which funds the creation and preservation of parkland.
Suzanne Hornick, an Ocean City resident and environmental activist, believes local opposition is strong, not only to the easement but to anything that would move the project forward.
“We do not want these cable bundles across our island,” said Hornick, who lives a few blocks from the proposed path of the cables. She is worried about damage to the ground and potential health hazards from electromagnetic fields emanating from the cables, she said.
“There’s no room here for that,” she said of the developer’s cable plan. “They want to come across our beach and our island, and the one main street in the middle of the island that gets you on and off… The area that they’re talking about is so narrow for such a huge cable.”
Local Opposition
Just how New Jersey will connect those 7,500 MW of offshore wind to the onshore grid will become increasingly important as the projects move through permitting and start construction. The BPU announced Monday that it has pushed back the date of its next solicitation, from September of this year to January 2023. The delay is partly to accommodate a BPU solicitation underway with PJM to help find solutions on how to upgrade the grid to handle the energy coming in from offshore wind projects. (See NJ Delays Third OSW Solicitation for PJM Tx, NY Bight Winners.)
The offshore wind projects, although warmly received by some environmentalists and public officials, have faced opposition from the fishing industry, which fears that the turbines will disrupt fishing areas and will create a dangerous environment for boats pulling nets. The tourism sector also has voiced concern that the sight of scores of turbines offshore could reduce the number of visitors coming to the state’s coast.
Similarly, local residents and property owners are worried about the impact for local properties resulting from construction to install cables and other equipment. (See NJ’s Offshore Wind Project Faces Criticism, Support.)
“Ocean City is a little, teeny … barrier island,” Hornick said. “The only thing that we have that maintains our quality of life and our community is our tourism.”
Overriding Home Rule
But Ørsted says the easements are necessary to apply for environmental permits for the project, as is the permission needed for the cable to run through land developed with state Green Acres funds. So far, however, despite discussions with the township stretching back to 2019, “Ocean Wind has been unable to obtain the required easements, consents and associated actions from Ocean City,” the petition said.
The company argues that if the BPU concludes that the easements, or rights of way, are “reasonably necessary for the construction or operation” of the project, S3926 allows the BPU to override municipal and county rules and issue its own order approving the easement.
Ørsted’s petition, however, argues that “in similar contexts involving public utility projects, both the Board and the courts of this State have long held that the welfare of the public generally transcends the municipal borders and local municipal concerns.”
The BPU’s intervention is “appropriate and important because local officials cannot be expected to balance local interests against the greater good of the public,” the petition says.
But others see S3926 as overriding New Jersey’s long-held tradition of home rule, which preserves the rights of local authorities to make decisions that affect their own back yards. Sen. Bob Smith (D), one of the bill’s sponsors, acknowledged the potential conflict but said the need to move swiftly to combat climate change made the measure necessary.
Ocean City officials voiced opposition to the bill before its passage. The township council voted 7-0 in June in favor of a symbolic resolution that said the law, if enacted, would “severely affect the ability of local governments to exercise home rule pertaining to the offshore wind farm project,” according to a local press report.
Hornick agrees. “We don’t have a choice anymore,” she said. “Our voices been taken away. And to me, that is the most un-American thing anybody could do.”
