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The auctioned areas are expected to generate enough power for nearly 2 million homes once turbines are built.

Turbines near Block Island, R.I., one of only two offshore wind farms currently operating in U.S. waters. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

WASHINGTON - The United States government netted a record $4.37 billion on Friday from the sale of six offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York and New Jersey, a major step in the Biden administration's goal of ushering in a future powered by renewable energy.

The auction, of more than 488,000 acres in the Atlantic Ocean between Cape May, N.J., and Montauk Point, N.Y., was the Biden administration's first offshore lease sale.

When turbines are built and start working, the auctioned acres are expected to generate up to 7,000 megawatts, enough to power nearly 2 million homes.

The Interior Department has said between that project and others currently under review, it hopes to see some 2,000 turbines churning from Massachusetts to North Carolina by the end of this decade.

"This week's offshore wind sale makes one thing clear: the enthusiasm for the clean energy economy is undeniable and it's here to stay," Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. She called the lease sales part of the administration's "commitment to tackle the climate crisis and create thousands of good-paying, union jobs across the nation."

The three-day, 64-round bidding war among more than a dozen companies for a triangular section of ocean known as the New York Bight surpassed expectations. The Interior Department said it was the highest-grossing competitive offshore energy lease sale in history, including oil and gas lease sales. Analysts noted that leases were sold at about $10,700 per acre, more than 10 times the previous record of $1,000 per acre. Industry analysts said even they were surprised by the level of interest, and attributed it to growing investment in offshore wind as well as strong state and federal policies.

"The record-shattering interest in the New York Bight lease sale is testament to how bright the American offshore wind outlook is and how confident developers are in the strength of the U.S. offshore wind industry as a whole," said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, which represents offshore energy companies, in a statement.

Mr. Milito called the auction "a watershed moment for American offshore wind" and said the demand for more offshore wind leasing was growing.

The Biden administration has set a goal of developing 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy nationwide by 2030. A report cited by the administration found investment by the burgeoning offshore wind industry will be worth $109 billion in the next ten years.

Heather Zichal, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, which represents wind, solar, storage and transmission companies, said the lease sale "blew our expectations out of the water" and heralded a new era of demand for clean energy.

"This is a major step forward for the U.S. in terms of standing up a new industry, the domestic manufacturing opportunities that come with it and another market signal in favor of U.S. energy independence," she said.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an arm of the Interior Department that oversees offshore activity, designated the New York Bight a "priority offshore wind area" in March of 2021. Last month, Secretary Haaland and the governors of New York and New Jersey issued a " shared vision " for bolstering the offshore wind energy domestic supply chain in the region.

Over the past year the Biden administration also gave final approval to the nation's first commercial-scale offshore wind farm off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and said it would open California's coast to wind farms. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also is expected to review 16 plans to construct and operate commercial offshore wind facilities by 2025, which the agency said would represent more than 22 gigawatts of clean energy.

Timothy Fox, a vice president and analyst with Clearview Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm, said he believed state policies had boosted investment as much as federal initiatives. He noted that New York and New Jersey had ambitious targets for offshore wind deployment - 9,000 megawatts and 7,500 megawatts, respectively, by 2035.

At the same time, he and others noted, the fishing industry has argued that wind farms will conflict with prime commercial fishing areas for scallops, clams and other seafood.

"While we expect the Biden administration to point to the auction as an example of its green energy bona fides, we caution that, long term, the greatest legal risk facing offshore wind could be the potential impact projects have on endangered species," Mr. Fox said.

"Federal restrictions can be unforgiving when any energy project would impose material risks on a listed endangered species or its critical habitat," he cautioned.

The Interior Department said that, as part of its review, the agency had reduced the acreage of the lease sale by 72 percent from its original plan "to avoid conflict with ocean users, and minimize environmental impacts."

Administration officials said that before the New York Bight leases are finalized, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission must conduct an anti-competitiveness review of the auction.

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Sale of Leases for Wind Farms Off New York Raises More Than $4 Billion

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The auctioned areas are expected to generate enough power for nearly 2 million homes once turbines are built. WASHINGTON - The United States government netted a record $4.37 billion on Friday from the sale of six offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York and New Jersey, a major step in the Biden administration's goal of ushering in a future powered by renewable energy.

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After passing through a security gate, the van descends into a tunnel that burrows under the forests of Olkiluoto, an island off Finland's west coast. The wheels crunch on crushed stone as a gray, wet October day gives way to darkness. "Welcome to Onkalo," deadpans Antti Mustonen, a geologist here. Onkalo-"cavity" or "pit" in Finnish-will be the world's first permanent disposal site for high-level nuclear waste, and a triumph for Finland.

Safety lights guide the van down through switchback turns that lead to a cavernous chamber, its walls reinforced with spray-on concrete. In just a few years, spent reactor fuel rods, encased in giant copper casks as tall as giraffes, will arrive here via elevator before robotic vehicles take them to one of the dozens of dead-end disposal tunnels that will form an ant's nest in the bedrock. In a freshly excavated disposal tunnel, Mustonen explains over the roar of ventilator fans that the peculiar smell comes from rock dust mixed with a trace of explosives. It is muddy underfoot-not what you want to see in a place that shouldn't have leaks, but Mustonen says the water is only from the excavation effort.

In the blackness, bare bedrock glints in the meager light from the van. After 30 to 40 of the copper casks are buried in the tunnel floor, the holes will be plugged with bentonite, a water-absorbing clay. Each tunnel will be backfilled with more bentonite and sealed with concrete. The casks will then begin their long vigil. They must remain undisturbed for 100,000 years, even as the warming climate of coming centuries gives way to the next ice age. "It's final disposal," Mustonen says. "Right here, in stable Finnish bedrock, 430 meters belowground, 420 meters below sea level."

Although nuclear power is declining in many nations, Finland has embraced the carbon-free energy source, lobbying the European Union to label it as sustainable. Two of the country's four reactors are on Olkiluoto. After a new Olkiluoto reactor is connected to the grid later this year, nuclear power will account for more than 40% of Finland's electricity.

The emissions-free electricity comes with a downside: hot and highly radioactive spent uranium fuel rods. In Finland, the rods cool for decades in pools of water; other nations park them in concrete and steel "dry storage" casks. Either way, surface storage is vulnerable to accidents, leaks, or neglect during the thousands of years the waste remains dangerous, says Budhi Sagar, a nuclear expert formerly at the Southwest Research Institute. "It's not safe-some disaster will occur," he says, citing the groundwater contaminated by leaky waste tanks at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Hanford Site in Washington state, where reactors produced plutonium for the first nuclear weapons.

Without a long-term solution, the waste is piling up. Finland had about 2300 tons of waste in 2019, and about 263,000 tons of spent fuel sit in interim storage facilities worldwide, a report this year from the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates. "In my view, that's an unacceptable legacy to leave to future generations," says Tom Isaacs, a strategic adviser for Canada's Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) and Southern California Edison. "We generated this electricity. We benefited from that."

Many experts view permanent deep repositories like Onkalo as the best solution, but getting community buy-in is often a deal breaker. Street protests have slowed down plans for a disposal site in France, and in 2009, after years of debate, then-President Barack Obama's administration gave up on plans to develop Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the U.S. national repository. "The U.S. approach didn't pay sufficient attention to community acceptance or engagement," says Isaacs, who was the lead adviser on a 2012 blue-ribbon report commissioned by DOE to chart a way forward. "The original approach led to conflict rather than cooperation."

Finland, however, has run into remarkably few problems with Onkalo, which the government approved as a site in 2000. It helped that the residents of Eurajoki, the town closest to Onkalo and the nearby reactors, were comfortable with nuclear power. "Almost everyone in Eurajoki has a friend or relative who has worked in the nuclear power plants, so they know how we operate," says Janne Mokka, CEO of Posiva, the nuclear waste company set up by two nuclear power utilities to develop and manage Onkalo.

But experts say the success of Onkalo also reflects unique cultural and political conditions in Finland: high trust in institutions, community engagement, a lack of state-level power centers, and a balance of power between industry and stakeholders. "If you tried to implement the same thing in a country with much lower levels of trust, it would probably fail," says Matti Kojo, a political science researcher at Tampere University in Finland.

"The Finns have been able to articulate a consistent message about what they're doing, why they believe this facility will be safe, and why it will be a major benefit to the wellbeing of certain communities," Isaacs says. In late December 2021, Posiva applied for a license to begin operations in 2024.

POSIVA BEGAN its search in the 1990s, with dozens of candidate sites, before narrowing the list to four with different geological characteristics. The final choice was between Olkiluoto and the area around the town of Loviisa, which houses the country's other nuclear power plants. In 1999, Posiva put forward the site that would become Onkalo.

The bedrock at Onkalo has been mostly stable for the past billion years, geologists say, although there is evidence of earthquakes during the past 10,000 years as massive glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age and the bedrock rebounded. Posiva scientists don't expect significant earthquakes in the region until after the next ice age. Mustonen says Onkalo was purposefully situated between two parallel fault zones about 800 meters apart. If an earthquake were to occur, it would preferentially happen along those existing fault lines, he says. "They absorb the movement and nothing happens here in the area in between."

But earthquakes aren't the main threat. "The only way for things to move from the repository out to the surface and to impact people is to be carried by water," says Sarah Hirschorn, director of geoscience at NWMO. That means deep repositories are best situated in certain types of clay, salt, or hard crystalline rock, because they have small, disconnected pore spaces and are almost impermeable to water. At Onkalo, the nearly 2-billion-year-old bedrock is mostly gneiss, a hard rock formed at high temperatures and pressures.

Although decidedly nonporous, these rocks can still contain cracks, and Posiva had to map and avoid them as workers dug deeper. "It's these fractures which control the movement of water," says Neil Chapman, a geologist who has served as an independent consultant for Finland's nuclear regulator, the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK). If any significant fractures are discovered when drilling individual cask pits, he says, those holes won't be used.

If water were somehow able to seep into the repository, it would still have to get past the bentonite and copper to reach the spent fuel. "You're never relying on a single barrier," says Emily Stein, who researches deep geologic disposal at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories. "If one barrier fails, you have other barriers that can minimize or prevent radionuclide release."

After arriving at Onkalo, spent fuel will be unpacked in an encapsulation plant. In a stainless steel room surrounded by 1.3-meter-thick concrete walls, robots will vacuum away any water left on the fuel rods from their time in the storage pools, and seal them within a cast-iron canister nested inside a copper canister. Argon will be injected between the two canisters to provide an inert atmosphere, and the copper cask will be welded shut.

Copper is slow to corrode, and by the time any groundwater does reach Onkalo's depths, chemical or microbial reactions would have consumed all of its dissolved oxygen, making it less reactive. But Peter Szakálos, a chemist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, has concerns. In a 2007 study, he and colleagues found signs that copper can corrode even in pure, oxygen-free water. When the metal is exposed to water, Szakálos and his colleagues found it releases a whiff of hydrogen gas. He suspects the water reacts with the copper to form a "distorted" copper oxide crystal along with free hydrogen, which is either released or absorbed into the copper. Szakálos says any absorbed hydrogen would make the copper brittle and prone to cracking, and bronze would have been a safer choice. "It's just a matter of time-between decades and centuries-before unalloyed copper canisters start to crack at Onkalo."

Posiva and SKB, Sweden's nuclear waste management company, say Szakálos's experimental conditions are not relevant for the planned repositories. Even so, SKB contracted Uppsala University and the University of Toronto to try to replicate the findings. The Uppsala tests did not find evidence of any reaction with pure water, whereas the Toronto group observed one but said it was too slow to matter. "Making a measurement that tells you nothing happened is impossible," says David Shoesmith of the University of Western Ontario, a corrosion chemist who has consulted for SKB. "Based on what's been published, the answer to this question is that minimal things will happen."

Those concerns nevertheless delayed plans for what would be the world's second deep repository, near the Swedish coastal town of Forsmark. In 2018, Sweden's Land and Environment Court called for SKB to provide more evidence that copper corrosion would not undermine long-term safety. SKB submitted additional documentation to the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, and in January, the Swedish government approved the facility based on the regulator's assessment that the other barriers would keep the repository safe.

In addition to the casks themselves, the bentonite surrounding them will also prevent radionuclide escape, regulators say. The mineral not only keeps water away, but also prevents microbes from reaching the canister surface. Microbes can pose a threat, says Karsten Pedersen, CEO of Microbial Analytics Sweden, a company that researches their effect on deep repositories, because they can metabolize sulfates in groundwater and turn them into sulfides, which can slowly corrode copper. Posiva acknowledges that possibility, but the company's calculations suggest that even at elevated sulfide levels, the canisters would have a lifetime of more than 100,000 years.

Should all these barriers fail, escaping waste would face one last impediment: the decades it would take to migrate to the surface, with radioactivity levels dropping all the while. Sagar, who reviewed the long-term scenarios that were a part of STUK's overall safety assessment, says that even under worst-case assumptions the impact of leaking radionuclides would be minimal. For people living near the repository and drinking contaminated water from deep wells, the assessment found, the annual exposure would be well below the allowable limit set by STUK, which is about the same as the average background radiation exposure a person in Finland experiences today. "That's the point of a multibarrier system," Sagar says. "Even if some containers fail or a systematic construction error means they all have defects, the geology and other barriers are good enough that you're still within limits."

YET THE TRUE SECRET to Finland's success with Onkalo lies not so much in geology and engineering, but in the site selection process, the structure of government, and a culture of trust in institutions and expertise.

Finland's 1987 Nuclear Energy Act set up a nuclear waste management fund, financed by the nuclear operators, which incentivizes companies to develop waste disposal solutions. It also insulates the process from politics. Isaacs notes how this differs starkly from the situation in the United States, where DOE-which answers to the White House-runs the waste disposal program. "No matter how competent and well-intentioned people are, presidential and congressional elections are held regularly," he says. Important decisions can end up subject to political expedience, crippling a project that takes decades to build.

Another important difference, according to Isaacs, is the absence of strong state-level government in Finland. State governments, often far from disposal sites, see repositories more in terms of perceived costs rather than benefits, Isaacs says. Nevada officials-governors, senators, and others-have consistently opposed the development of the Yucca Mountain facility, blocking funding and throwing up other hurdles. More recently, state politicians in New Mexico have opposed a proposed temporary storage facility for nuclear waste in the state.

In Finland, without comparable power centers to play spoiler, Posiva and the national government could deal directly with communities like Eurajoki. Community acceptance was forged in the back and forth between Eurajoki and Posiva, Kojo says. "In the 1990s, the power companies knew that they really needed approval at the local level," he explains. Finnish law gave Eurajoki the right to veto disposal in the area. But Eurajoki officials were tempted by the tax revenue that would come from the third nuclear power plant if Posiva's parent company, TVO, decided to build it there. Posiva also funded the construction of a new senior center in town.

This approach-continual engagement with potential host communities-is rare in many other countries, including the United States. Even in Finland it is new. In the mid-1980s, Finland had a technical, top-down approach with no public participation that experts like Kojo and Isaacs call "decide-announce-defend." In 1986, TVO announced it would investigate the municipality of Ikaalinen as a final disposal site. However, local resistance, particularly in the wake of the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union, foiled the plans. The company realized it would have to engage more and build local political support using an approach Kojo calls "mitigate-understand-mediate."

Once an agreement was reached, Eurajoki residents were largely willing to leave technical matters and safety questions to expert bodies. "In Finland, there is a very high level of trust in science and in the authorities," Kojo says. "If the national authority says the repository is safe, they don't need to worry about it." The process became a purely technocratic affair in the hands of Posiva and STUK.

Not everyone's concerns have been allayed. The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (FANC) says it is worried about long-term ecotoxicity and bioaccumulation of the radioisotopes. It also cites concerns raised by retired geologist Matti Saarnisto, former director of research for the Geological Survey of Finland. In 2010, Saarnisto told Finland's national broadcaster that as the next ice age arrives, freezing soil and rock could create pressures that would damage the repository. In any case, Saarnisto argued, it is impossible to make predictions on the scale of 100,000 years.

Jari Natunen, a scientist with FANC, says the relationship between industry and regulators in Finland is far too cozy-a form of "structural corruption." "The authorities are biased to think that the industry's position is correct and valuable, and the concerns of civil society are not," says Natunen, who is also a member of Nuclear Transparency Watch, an antinuclear advocacy organization.

Natunen adds that the Finnish media's coverage of Onkalo has been too compliant. By contrast, in the United States, France, and Sweden, safety concerns remain a central part of the public debate. A 2020 study by Kojo and his colleagues, for example, found that France's Le Monde newspaper played a more critical role in debates about repositories, acting as a watchdog that challenged authorities, whereas Finland's leading daily, the Helsingin Sanomat, generally took a more positive approach that reflected the framing and confidence of the government and industry.

If getting the operating license goes smoothly, Posiva is on track to begin to bury nuclear waste deep in the Finnish bedrock in 2024 or 2025. Excavation will continue over the next century as new disposal tunnels are added. When the repository is filled to capacity, sometime around 2120, the entrance tunnel will be sealed shut. The encapsulation plant and other surface structures will be demolished. Nothing above will remain, not even a warning sign. Deep below the dismantled site, 6500 tons of spent fuel rods will lie in their tombs, quiet but still warm from radioactive decay.

"What we are doing really has meaning and is really important," Mustonen says. "For me, this is the reasonable thing to do with nuclear waste, and we need to make it as good as possible. The sense of responsibility to the next generation doesn't keep me awake at night, but it's there. It just is."

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Finland built this tomb to store nuclear waste. Can it survive for 100,000 years?

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After passing through a security gate, the van descends into a tunnel that burrows under the forests of Olkiluoto, an island off Finland's west coast. The wheels crunch on crushed stone as a gray, wet October day gives way to darkness. "Welcome to Onkalo," deadpans Antti Mustonen, a geologist here.

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TX Power Grid Disaster - How it Happened

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TX Power Grid Disaster - How it Happened

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Millions in Texas are still in the dark following the deadly winter storm that caused the state's worst blackouts in decades, leaving households without power as temperatures dropped to record lows.

While the state scrambles to restore power, questions are arising about why Texas was so ill-equipped, and what can be done to ensure this doesn't happen again.

A confluence of factors led to the historic blackouts, and officials are already calling for investigations into the chain of events.

Looking forward, experts say there are a number of steps the state can take to combat future issues, including weatherizing equipment and increasing reserve margins.

"We need to better realize how vulnerable our energy systems are - both electricity and the vulnerability of electricity and natural gas systems together," said Daniel Cohan, associate professor at Rice University. "This is going to take some regrouping and there's not going to be a single step. We're going to need a portfolio of steps."

Winterize equipment?

The storm dumped snow and ice across the Midwest and South, taking power production offline just as consumers turned up their thermostats amid the frigid temperatures.

No power source was immune - coal, natural gas, crude, wind and solar production all dipped. Pipeline freezes impeded the flow of natural gas and crude oil. The outages were concentrated in Texas as the grid was forced to shed load, unable to keep pace with the spike in demand. At one point, more than four million people were without power.

"It was a black swan event from the demand side and supply side, and the freeze-off created this supply issue," said Michael Bradley, managing director at Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. He noted that equipment freezing is not a headline event.

However, over the weekend all 254 Texas counties were placed under weather advisory warnings, which is rare. Typically if a cold front hits one area, production moves elsewhere. That wasn't possible this time around, and icy roads meant equipment couldn't be serviced.

Of course, power equipment operates in places that are much colder than Texas, so one step that can be taken would be to winterize equipment. The state is used to extreme heat and drought, but its infrastructure simply is not equipped to operate in extreme cold.

"They have the infrastructure in place that meets the needs 99.9% of the time," said Rebecca Babin, senior equity trader at CIBC Private Wealth. "On these tail events, they're really ill equipped. They're not incentivized to invest in the infrastructure to make those improvements."

Texas has a stand-alone power grid that's deregulated.

The majority of the state's power is controlled by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is known as ERCOT. It's a competitive pricing market, meaning it trades on supply and demand. Companies are trying to bring the cheapest form of energy to the market, which can come at the expense of building out more reliable infrastructure systems.

"Texas has chosen to operate its power grid as an island," noted Rice University's Cohan, which means the state can't import power from other states when it's most needed. He added that the impacts are also felt in the fall and spring, when Texas has an abundance of power that it can't export.

Increase reserve margin?

The severity of the storm was underestimated, including by ERCOT.

Ahead of the inclement weather ERCOT estimated how much power it would need under various scenarios, but the reality exceeded even its extreme forecast. "The magnitude of the forecast error was massive," said consulting firm ICF International.

ERCOT does have a reserve margin - the amount of excess supply needed to meet peak power demand - but since the market is unregulated companies don't want to shoulder the cost. Raising the reserve margin would mean that crises of this magnitude could potentially be avoided down the line. While it would be difficult to force an increase in the reserve margin, incentives could spur adoption.

Matt Breidert, portfolio manager at Ecofin, called the Texas grid a "Wild West" market designed based on short-run prices. Were Texas connected to the broader grid, "it might have a more stable resource portfolio to handle this event."

Power prices jump

With utilities scrambling to keep the lights on, power prices are surging across Texas as contractual obligations force companies to buy at any price.

CIBC's Babin noted that Texas' unregulated market is exacerbating the price swings as energy producers are forced to buy megawatts in the open market.

Some of the heightened cost could end up on Texas consumers' utility bills. Companies such as Griddy - which gives consumers access to wholesale electricity prices - have outlined ways for its users to switch power providers in an effort to shield them from volatile price swings.

"The power price is usually about $20, $30, $40 per megawatt hour, and because of extreme events, the price of power hit the $9,000 cap. That's very extreme," said Ron Silvestri, senior analyst at Neuberger Berman.

Natural gas prices jumped 3% on Wednesday, after surging more than 7% on Tuesday. For the month, prices are up 26%. While the impact on oil prices has been more muted, West Texas Intermediate crude futures traded around a 13-month high on Wednesday.

The role of renewables

Some have pointed fingers at renewables as causing the blackouts, but in reality the vast majority of the outages stemmed from issues with natural gas production.

That said, solar and wind also went offline as frozen blades made wind turbines inoperable.

But in the wake of the disaster the role of renewables within Texas' energy mix will likely be reevaluated.

Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co.'s Bradley said that he believes there will be a slowdown on the adoption of renewables in favor of more natural gas buildout. While renewables weren't the root cause here, they're an intermittent power source, which means they can't ramp up operations at will. Natural gas and coal, on the other hand, can.

Energy storage is the key to making renewables a more dependable power alternative, and Neuberger Berman's Silvestri said that the Texas blackouts could also lead to faster buildout of storage options.

They have the infrastructure in place that meets the needs 99.9% of the time. On these tail events, they're really ill equipped. They're not incentivized to invest in the infrastructure to make those improvements.

senior equity trader at CIBC Private Wealth

"Grid-level storage adds resiliency when power generation capabilities are mitigated," said analysts at research firm Baird. "Furthermore, both solar and storage provide grid operators with additional functionality such as peak power shedding and/or shifting."

Demand response programs are another way for companies to monitor the grid especially as greater adoption of renewable energy impacts the available supply. Making the grid smarter can help utility companies have an accurate view of the current supply and demand picture, while demand response systems can act as a controlled way to curb usage.

"The central idea is that power consumption can be temporarily curtailed in times of peak demand, but instead of doing it disruptively as is the case with load-shedding, it is done in a controlled manner," noted analysts from Raymond James.

As millions remain without power and with more inclement weather on the way, regulators are calling for investigations into what happened.

"The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours," Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement Tuesday. "Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather. This is unacceptable."

Texas isn't the only state to be plagued by power outages in recent memory.

Over the summer California was plagued by blackouts, and while the causes are much different this time around, the instances demonstrate the fragility of the grid. With extreme weather events becoming more frequent, and with more being demanded of the grid - including electric vehicles - the infrastructure is strained.
Correction: This story has been revised to correct that some power grid outside of Texas also are deregulated. Subscribe for exclusive insights and analysis, and live business day programming from around the world.

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How the Texas power grid failed and what could stop it from happening again

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Millions in Texas are still in the dark following the deadly winter storm that caused the state's worst blackouts in decades, leaving households without power as temperatures dropped to record lows. While the state scrambles to restore power, questions are arising about why Texas was so ill-equipped, and what can be done to ensure this doesn't happen again.

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CALIPATRIA, Calif.-In the U.S. hunt for lithium, an essential component of the batteries that power electric vehicles and cellphones, one big untapped source might be bubbling under a giant lake in Southern California.

The U.S. currently imports almost all of its lithium, but research shows large reserves in underground geothermal brines-a scalding hot soup of minerals, metals and saltwater. The catch: Extracting lithium from such a source at commercial scale is untested.

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Where Is There More Lithium to Power Cars and Phones? Beneath a California Lake.

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CALIPATRIA, Calif.-In the U.S. hunt for lithium, an essential component of the batteries that power electric vehicles and cellphones, one big untapped source might be bubbling under a giant lake in Southern California. The U.S. currently imports almost all of its lithium, but research shows large reserves in underground geothermal brines-a scalding hot soup of minerals, metals and saltwater.

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Pretty good, actually...

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The Transition to Electric Cars

In short: Very green. But plug-in cars still have environmental effects. Here's a guide to the main issues and how they might be addressed.

Credit... The New York Times

Around the world, governments and automakers are promoting electric vehicles as a key technology to curb oil use and fight climate change. General Motors has said it aims to stop selling new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 and will pivot to battery-powered models. This week, Volvo said it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030.

But as electric cars and trucks go mainstream, they have faced a persistent question: Are they really as green as advertised?

While experts broadly agree that plug-in vehicles are a more climate-friendly option than traditional vehicles, they can still have their own environmental impacts, depending on how they're charged up and manufactured. Here's a guide to some of the biggest worries - and how they might be addressed.

Broadly speaking, most electric cars sold today tend to produce significantly fewer planet-warming emissions than most cars fueled with gasoline. But a lot depends on how much coal is being burned to charge up those plug-in vehicles. And electric grids still need to get much, much cleaner before electric vehicles are truly emissions free.

One way to compare the climate impacts of different vehicle models is with this interactive online tool by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who tried to incorporate all the relevant factors: what it takes to manufacture the cars, how much gasoline conventional cars burn and where the electricity to charge electric vehicles comes from.

If you assume electric vehicles are drawing their power from the average grid in the United States, which typically includes a mix of fossil fuel and renewable power plants, then they're almost always much greener than conventional cars. Even though electric vehicles are more emissions-intensive to make because of their batteries, their electric motors are more efficient than traditional internal combustion engines that burn fossil fuels.

An all-electric Chevrolet Bolt, for instance, can be expected to produce 189 grams of carbon dioxide for every mile driven over its lifetime, on average. By contrast, a new gasoline-fueled Toyota Camry is estimated to produce 385 grams of carbon dioxide per mile. A new Ford F-150 pickup truck, which is even less fuel-efficient, produces 636 grams of carbon dioxide per mile.

But that's just an average. On the other hand, if the Bolt is charged up on a coal-heavy grid, such as those currently found in the Midwest, it can actually be a bit worse for the climate than a modern hybrid car like the Toyota Prius, which runs on gasoline but uses a battery to bolster its mileage. (The coal-powered Bolt would still beat the Camry and the F-150, however.)

"Coal tends to be the critical factor," said Jeremy Michalek, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. "If you've got electric cars in Pittsburgh that are being plugged in at night and leading nearby coal plants to burn more coal to charge them, then the climate benefits won't be as great, and you can even get more air pollution."

The good news for electric vehicles is that most countries are now pushing to clean up their electric grids. In the United States, utilities have retired hundreds of coal plants over the last decade and shifted to a mix of lower-emissions natural gas, wind and solar power. As a result, researchers have found, electric vehicles have generally gotten cleaner, too. And they are likely to get cleaner still.

"The reason electric vehicles look like an appealing climate solution is that if we can make our grids zero-carbon, then vehicle emissions drop way, way down," said Jessika Trancik, an associate professor of energy studies at M.I.T. "Whereas even the best hybrids that burn gasoline will always have a baseline of emissions they can't go below."

Like many other batteries, the lithium-ion cells that power most electric vehicles rely on raw materials - like cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements - that have been linked to grave environmental and human rights concerns. Cobalt has been especially problematic.

Mining cobalt produces hazardous tailings and slags that can leach into the environment, and studies have found high exposure in nearby communities, especially among children, to cobalt and other metals. Extracting the metals from their ores also requires a process called smelting, which can emit sulfur oxide and other harmful air pollution.

And as much as 70 percent of the world's cobalt supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a substantial proportion in unregulated "artisanal" mines where workers - including many children - dig the metal from the earth using only hand tools at great risk to their health and safety, human rights groups warn.

The world's lithium is either mined in Australia or from salt flats in the Andean regions of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, operations that use large amounts of groundwater to pump out the brines, drawing down the water available to Indigenous farmers and herders. The water required for producing batteries has meant that manufacturing electric vehicles is about 50 percent more water intensive than traditional internal combustion engines. Deposits of rare earths, concentrated in China, often contain radioactive substances that can emit radioactive water and dust.

Focusing first on cobalt, automakers and other manufacturers have committed to eliminating "artisanal" cobalt from their supply chains, and have also said they will develop batteries that decrease, or do away with, cobalt altogether. But that technology is still in development, and the prevalence of these mines means these commitments "aren't realistic," said Mickaël Daudin of Pact, a nonprofit organization that works with mining communities in Africa.

Instead, Mr. Daudin said, manufacturers need to work with these mines to lessen their environmental footprint and make sure miners are working in safe conditions. If companies acted responsibly, the rise of electric vehicles would be a great opportunity for countries like Congo, he said. But if they don't, "they will put the environment, and many, many miners' lives at risk."

As earlier generations of electric vehicles start to reach the end of their lives, preventing a pileup of spent batteries looms as a challenge.

Most of today's electric vehicles use lithium-ion batteries, which can store more energy in the same space than older, more commonly-used lead-acid battery technology. But while 99 percent of lead-acid batteries are recycled in the United States, estimated recycling rates for lithium-ion batteries are about 5 percent.

Experts point out that spent batteries contain valuable metals and other materials that can be recovered and reused. Depending on the process used, battery recycling can also use large amounts of water, or emit air pollutants.

"The percentage of lithium batteries being recycled is very low, but with time and innovation, that's going to increase," said Radenka Maric, a professor at the University of Connecticut's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

A different, promising approach to tackling used electric vehicle batteries is finding them a second life in storage and other applications. "For cars, when the battery goes below say 80 percent of its capacity, the range is reduced," said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "But that's not a constraint for stationary storage."

Various automakers, including Nissan and BMW, have piloted the use of old electric vehicle batteries for grid storage. General Motors has said it designed its battery packs with second-life use in mind. But there challenges: Reusing lithium-ion batteries requires extensive testing and upgrades to make sure they perform reliably.

If done properly, though, used car batteries could continue to be used for a decade or more as backup storage for solar power, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a study last year.

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The Transition to Electric Cars In short: Very green. But plug-in cars still have environmental effects. Here's a guide to the main issues and how they might be addressed. Around the world, governments and automakers are promoting electric vehicles as a key technology to curb oil use and fight climate change.

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World Energy Hits a Turning Point: Solar That's Cheaper Than Wind - Bloomberg

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World Energy Hits a Turning Point: Solar That's Cheaper Than Wind - Bloomberg

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A transformation is happening in global energy markets that's worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity.

This has happened in isolated projects in the past: an especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects, according to fresh data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The chart below shows the average cost of new wind and solar from 58 emerging-market economies, including China, India, and Brazil. While solar was bound to fall below wind eventually, given its steeper price declines, few predicted it would happen this soon. 1

Source: Bloomberg New Energy Finance

"Solar investment has gone from nothing-literally nothing-like five years ago to quite a lot," said Ethan Zindler, head of U.S. policy analysis at BNEF. "A huge part of this story is China, which has been rapidly deploying solar" and helping other countries finance their own projects.

Half the Price of Coal

This year has seen a remarkable run for solar power. Auctions, where private companies compete for massive contracts to provide electricity, established record after record for cheap solar power. It started with a contract in January to produce electricity for $64 per megawatt-hour in India; then a deal in August pegging $29.10 per megawatt hour in Chile. That's record-cheap electricity-roughly half the price of competing coal power.

"Renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting" fossil fuel prices, BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich said in a note to clients this week.

Those are new contracts, but plenty of projects are reaching completion this year, too. When all the 2016 completions are tallied in coming months, it's likely that the total amount of solar photovoltaics added globally will exceed that of wind for the first time. The latest BNEF projections call for 70 gigawatts of newly installed solar in 2016 compared with 59 gigawatts of wind.

The overall shift to clean energy can be more expensive in wealthier nations, where electricity demand is flat or falling and new solar must compete with existing billion-dollar coal and gas plants. But in countries that are adding new electricity capacity as quickly as possible, "renewable energy will beat any other technology in most of the world without subsidies," said Liebreich.

Turning Points

The world recently passed a turning point and is adding more capacity for clean energy each year than for coal and natural gas combined. Peak fossil-fuel use for electricity may be reached within the next decade.

Thursday's BNEF report, called Climatescope, ranks and profiles emerging markets for their ability to attract capital for low-carbon energy projects. The top-scoring markets were China, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, and India.

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When it comes to renewable energy investment, emerging markets have taken the lead over the 35 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), spending $154.1 billion in 2015 compared with $153.7 billion by those wealthier countries, BNEF said. The growth rates of clean-energy deployment are higher in these emerging-market states, so they are likely to remain the clean energy leaders indefinitely, especially now that three-quarters have established clean-energy targets.

Still, the buildup of wind and solar takes time, and fossil fuels remain the cheapest option for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Coal and natural gas will continue to play a key role in the alleviation of energy poverty for millions of people in the years to come.

But for populations still relying on expensive kerosene generators, or who have no electricity at all, and for those living in the dangerous smog of thickly populated cities, the shift to renewables and increasingly to solar can't come soon enough.

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World Energy Hits a Turning Point: Solar That's Cheaper Than Wind

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A transformation is happening in global energy markets that's worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity. This has happened in isolated projects in the past: an especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs.

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The Electrical Grid is 50 years old using older technology

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The Electrical Grid is 50 years old using older technology

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Sunrise Powerlink carves a twisting path through the deserts and mountains of Southern California, skirting the U.S.-Mexico border and cutting through a national forest on its 117-mile path from the rural Imperial Valley to urban San Diego County.

Critics fought hard to stop Sunrise Powerlink from getting built. They said the $1.9-billion transmission line would saddle energy consumers with unnecessary costs, degrade sensitive wildlife habitat and interrupt a series of gorgeous landscapes.

But a decade later, the project is serving its intended purpose: bringing solar and wind power to city dwellers.

"You could have all the renewable energy in the world. But if you don't have the transmission lines, you have nothing," then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said at the groundbreaking ceremony for Sunrise Powerlink in 2010.

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Today, the United States is buckling under the weight of a worsening pandemic that has claimed more than 127,000 lives and put an estimated 30 million Americans out of work.

Building more power lines wouldn't stop the spread of COVID-19. But energy experts say investing in transmission would put people back to work and help urban areas across the country ditch fossil fuels. The burning of those fuels not only drives the climate crisis, but generates lung-damaging air pollution that has been linked to greater likelihood of death from the coronavirus.

What makes transmission so useful?

It's a matter of geography: Rural areas with powerful winds or abundant sunshine - such as California's Imperial Valley - are the easiest places for companies to build facilities that generate lots of cheap, clean electricity. But those places are typically far from the population centers that use the most energy - hence the need for giant power cords that connect supply with demand.

Removing regulatory obstacles to transmission would fuel economic growth, supporters say. New power lines would facilitate the construction of solar and wind farms, creating high-paying jobs. And private investors would do the financial heavy lifting.

"If you're looking at infrastructure spending, the electric grid is the most fundamental infrastructure there is," said Cheryl LaFleur, who served nine years on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission after being appointed by President Obama.

The American Council on Renewable Energy and Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, both industry groups, in June launched the Macro Grid Initiative, a public relations campaign to promote the benefits of transmission, funded in part by Bill Gates.

A few weeks later, House Democrats unveiled a climate policy plan that recommends building more transmission, with a goal of "modernizing and expanding the electric grid [to] allow more Americans to benefit from low-cost, zero-emission electricity."

The U.S. electricity supply has gotten cleaner over the last decade as solar and wind energy costs have plummeted, prompting utilities to shut down coal plants. But efforts to accelerate the transition by building power lines have been stifled by opposition from landowners who don't want lattice towers and wires interrupting their views, and by state and local officials who want to know how proposed transmission corridors will benefit their constituents - and not just the cities at the end of the line.

Conservationists have also worked to block some projects, arguing that poorly sited transmission lines and renewable energy facilities can do serious ecological damage, even as they help to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions fueling the climate crisis.

Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University, sees both sides of the conservation argument.

"There's obviously really compelling arguments," he said, for an expanded power grid. But all infrastructure projects - including renewable energy - can take an ecological toll, especially when they're built on undisturbed public lands in the American West.

As one example, Mulvaney pointed out that ravens, which prey on baby desert tortoises, often nest in transmission towers.

"Whenever you see public lands versus infrastructure, you almost inevitably get these kinds of conflicts," he said.

Transmission projects are slow by nature. Even with regulatory support, they wouldn't provide an immediate economic kick-start.

But scientists say humanity must slash fossil fuel emissions quickly and dramatically to limit the damage from worsening heat waves, droughts, fires and other consequences of climate change. And as COVID-19 hobbles global economies, organizations as diverse as the International Monetary Fund and the Sunrise Movement have called for stimulus plans that accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and create jobs in the clean energy industry, which before the pandemic employed 3.4 million Americans.
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Most Republican politicians in Washington, D.C., continue to oppose anything resembling a comprehensive climate plan, even as polls show voters overwhelmingly favor more aggressive federal action. But power grid investments might be different.

"Transmission's one of those issues that I think there's broad consensus on. I don't think it's a controversial issue," Neil Chatterjee, a former advisor to Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell who was tapped by President Trump to lead the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said in a recent interview. "We've got to have transmission in place to ensure that the grid of the future is there."

An 'embarrassing' history on grid infrastructure

Transmission proponents have been making the same arguments for years, with little to show for it.

During the early years of the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Energy pledged to "accelerate the permitting and construction" of seven projects that would cross federal lands. The list included a 730-mile power line designed to bring wind energy from the Wyoming plains to cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and a 290-mile line connecting Idaho and Oregon.

Nearly a decade later, only two of the seven projects have been built.

In "Superpower," a book published last year, Wall Street Journal reporter Russell Gold chronicled the developer Michael Skelly's unsuccessful effort to string more than 700 miles of electric wiring from the Oklahoma Panhandle to Tennessee, and bring wind power from the Great Plains to the Southeast. The project was stymied by lawsuits from Arkansas landowners along the proposed route, tepid support from federal agencies and fierce opposition from U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican.

"It's increasingly embarrassing to see how we've dealt with infrastructure investments in the United States," Skelly said in a recent webinar organized by Americans for a Clean Energy Grid. "All we can seem to figure out how to do is build more highways."

America's power grid is aging and fragmented. Much of it was built a half-century ago or more, with many lines designed to carry electrons from coal-fired power plants or hydroelectric dams. The western and eastern parts of the country operate on largely separate networks, each of them divided into dozens of smaller jurisdictions. Texas has its own, largely disconnected grid.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a federal research institute, reported in 2018 that building lines across the "seams" of those grids, to better connect different parts of the country, could create as much as $3.30 in benefits for every dollar invested.

Similarly, a 2016 study from researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that a national network of high-voltage, direct-current power lines could reduce planet-warming emissions from the power sector 80% below 1990 levels by 2030, while saving consumers $47.2 billion a year - almost three times as much as the cost of the new transmission.

Why the huge cost savings? In part because it's cheaper to generate solar energy in sunnier places and wind energy in windier places - and in part because the sun shines and the wind blows at different times of day in different parts of the country.

Interior western states, for instance, could import solar power in the evening from California, where the sun sets an hour later. Or California could tap Wyoming's powerful wind resource as a cheaper, cleaner alternative to firing up gas plants after sundown.

Wyoming wind is the impetus for one of the Obama administration's long-delayed priority transmission lines that may yet get built.

The conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz - whose holdings include L.A.'s Staples Center and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival - has been developing the $3-billion TransWest Express power line since 2008. It would originate at a massive wind farm Anschutz is building in Wyoming and extend 730 miles to Southern Nevada, where it would connect to the California grid.

Asked why the transmission project has taken so long, Anschutz Corp. executive Bill Miller pointed to a federal environmental review that took about six years; the need to secure permits from two states and 14 counties; and the difficulty of negotiating rights of way with some 450 private landowners along the route. Even now, negotiations continue with a few landowners.

Most developers don't have the money or the patience for a project like that. Anschutz has already spent more than $400 million developing the transmission line and wind farm, with Miller hopeful construction on TransWest Express will begin next year.

Miller is confident there will be demand for the wind power the company plans to generate. California law calls for 100% climate-friendly electricity by 2045, and other southwestern states are upping their ambition, with Nevada and New Mexico also targeting 100% clean power. Across the country, city and state governments, electric utilities and private companies are setting similar goals.

"In spite of COVID-19 and everything else, we see the whole country leaning in on what's happening with renewables," Miller said.

'It's not going to be pretty'

In 2011, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued rules designed to improve regional transmission planning, spread the costs of new power lines more broadly and open the marketplace to competitive bidders, not just monopoly utility companies.

Those steps were supposed to unleash a wave of transmission development. But they didn't work.

Answers to what went wrong depend on whom you ask. But there are plenty of ideas for what the federal government might try next, including nine pages of recommendations in the House Democrats' newly released climate plan. The ideas include funding and technical assistance for states to conduct faster environmental reviews; a dedicated tax credit for transmission investments, such as the one the solar industry enjoys; and building power lines alongside existing railroads and highways, where possible.

The conversation usually comes around to an issue at the heart of American democracy: state versus federal authority.

Unlike natural gas pipelines, whose approval falls solely to the federal government, electric lines can be vetoed by any state along their route. State officials have played a role in derailing major projects, including the Northern Pass transmission line, which would have brought Canadian hydropower to New England but was blocked by New Hampshire regulators.

"NIMBYism is not irrational for many people. They could be bearing the costs, and not getting the benefits," said David Spence, an energy law professor at University of Texas at Austin.

Even without a full federal takeover, clean energy advocates say there may be ways to shift some decision-making away from local officials. The House Democrats' climate plan suggests allowing federal regulators to authorize any clean energy-oriented power lines that were already approved by one or more states, even if other states have rejected the project or withheld approval.

"If we really want to meet our low-carbon future, what has to change, and who has to do what to get there?" asked Julia Prochnik, an energy consultant who previously served as director of western renewable grid planning at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's not going to be pretty. It's not going to be what everyone wants. But we're all going to gain something."

Not everyone is embracing transmission.

Some climate advocates would rather see policymakers focus on smaller, more local forms of clean power, such as rooftop solar, batteries housed in garages and community microgrids. Energy economists tend to be less enamored with these "distributed" clean power technologies, arguing they produce more expensive electricity than large-scale solar and wind power plants.

As for big solar and wind farms, Mulvaney thinks they ought to be built on previously disturbed lands. At times, he's felt frustrated by companies that use climate change to push projects that could harm species such as sage grouse and desert tortoises.

Energy developers, Mulvaney said, "are somewhat taking advantage of people who want to solve the climate crisis."

"It's either the tortoise gets it from the land-use change, or it gets it from climate change," he said. "But I think there are so many more possibilities, and we should be open to what these possibilities are."

One possibility is to use existing power lines. Especially in the West, coal-plant retirements are opening up long-distance wires that could be used to bring clean energy to cities. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, for instance, is planning to import large amounts of solar and wind energy through a transmission line that currently carries coal-fired electricity from Utah.

Los Angeles is also exploring a partnership with the Navajo Nation to develop solar power on tribal lands, utilizing long-distance wires that previously connected the city with the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, which closed last year.

But reducing emissions fast enough to meet global climate targets is unlikely without at least some additions to the power grid.

"There are those who say we can get there without transmission. Our view is that's not true," said Larry Gasteiger, executive director of Wires, an energy industry trade group. "You're going to need transmission to be part of the solution."

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Want jobs and clean energy? This overlooked technology could deliver both

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Sunrise Powerlink carves a twisting path through the deserts and mountains of Southern California, skirting the U.S.-Mexico border and cutting through a national forest on its 117-mile path from the rural Imperial Valley to urban San Diego County. Critics fought hard to stop Sunrise Powerlink from getting built.

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How Texas’ Drive for Energy Independence Set It Up for Disaster (Published 2021)

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Texas has refused to join interstate electrical grids and railed against energy regulation. Now it’s having to answer to millions of residents who were left without power in last week’s snowstorm.

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And now the really big coal plants start to close...

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And now the really big coal plants start to close...

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When the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona shuts down later this year, it will be one of the largest carbon emitters to ever close in American history.

The giant coal plant on Arizona's high desert emitted almost 135 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2017, according to an E&E News review of federal figures.

Its average annual emissions over that period are roughly equivalent to what 3.3 million passenger cars would pump into the atmosphere in a single year. Of all the coal plants to be retired in the United States in recent years, none has emitted more.

The Navajo Generating Station isn't alone. It's among a new wave of super-polluters headed for the scrap heap. Bruce Mansfield, a massive coal plant in Pennsylvania, emitted nearly 123 million tons between 2010 and 2017. It, too, will be retired by year's end (Energywire, Aug. 12).

And in western Kentucky, the Paradise plant emitted some 102 million tons of carbon over that period. The Tennessee Valley Authority closed two of Paradise's three units in 2017. It will close the last one next year (, Feb. 14).

"It's just the economics keep moving in a direction that favors natural gas and renewables. Five years ago, it was about the older coal plants becoming uneconomic," said Dan Bakal, senior director of electric power at Ceres, which works with businesses to transition to clean energy. "Now, it's becoming about every coal unit, and it's a question of how long they can survive."

Coal plant closures have been a feature of U.S. power markets for the better part of a decade, as stagnant demand, low natural gas prices and increasing competition from renewables have battered the coal fleet.

In previous years, most retirements were made up of smaller and lesser-used units (Climatewire, April 27, 2017). That means the emissions reductions were less substantial.

In 2015, the United States closed 15 gigawatts of coal capacity, or roughly 5% of the coal fleet. That still stands as a record amount of coal capacity retired in one year.

Yet the emissions reductions were modest by today's standards. The units retired in 2015 emitted a combined 261 million tons in the six years prior to their retirement, according to an E&E News review of EPA emissions data. On average, they annually emitted about 43 million tons over that period.

Contrast that to 2018, when almost 14 GW of coal was retired. Those units emitted 511 million tons of carbon between 2010 and 2015. Their combined average annual emissions rate was 83 million tons.

The trend figures to be even more dramatic this year.

Small plants are gone

The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects almost 8 GW of coal to retire in 2019, or a little more than half the capacity retired in 2015. Yet the units retired this year emitted more than their 2015 counterparts. Between 2010 and 2015, their combined emissions were 328 million tons, giving them an annual emissions average of 55 million tons.

Other factors are also at play in the retirement of coal's behemoths. In some cases, federal air quality regulations or an exodus of customers may have contributed to the closure, said John Larsen, who leads power-sector analysis at the Rhodium Group, an economic consulting firm.

The Navajo Generating Station is a case in point. The plant had already planned to shut down a unit to comply with federal smog regulations. Two utilities with a stake in the facility had either divested from the plant or plan to do so. And the plant's largest customer announced it could buy power on the wholesale market for less.

"You notice the average size of retired plants going up over time. There are not a lot of small plants left, period," Larsen said. "Once you've cleared out all the old inefficient stuff, it's logical the next wave would be bigger and have more implications for the climate."

There are several caveats to consider. Units scheduled for retirement generally produce less in the years running up to their closure, meaning the plants that closed in 2015 once emitted more than they did near the end of their lives.

There's also this: The vast majority of super-polluters have no closure date in sight. That's because massive coal plants generally benefit from large economies of scale. Because they crank out power around the clock, their cost of generating electricity is relatively cheap.

"The coal plants remaining have generally installed all the environmental controls," Larsen said. "There are no additional regulatory threats, or they are cost-effective in a world where gas is $2.50 per MMBtu."

Another caveat: Coal plant closures don't guarantee power-sector emissions reductions on their own. In 2018, power-sector emissions increased for the first time in many years because electricity demand rose, prompting natural gas generation to spike (Climatewire, Jan. 14).

But if there is a notable trend with the current round of plant closures, it is this: The large coal plants closing today are in places like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

"You're not seeing climate policy close these plants," said Mike O'Boyle, director of electricity policy for Energy Innovation, a nonprofit that advocates for a transition to clean energy. "Coal plants are becoming more expensive to operate over time."
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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And Now the Really Big Coal Plants Begin to Close

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When the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona shuts down later this year, it will be one of the largest carbon emitters to ever close in American history. The giant coal plant on Arizona's high desert emitted almost 135 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2017, according to an E&E News review of federal figures.

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How Electric Cars Can Create the Biggest Disruption Since the iPhone - Bloomberg

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How Electric Cars Can Create the Biggest Disruption Since the iPhone - Bloomberg

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The rise of and its rivals could be turbo charged by complementary services from Uber Technologies Inc. and 's Waymo unit, just as the iPhone rode the app economy and fast mobile internet to decimate mobile phone giants like .

The culmination of these technologies - autonomous electric cars available on demand - could transform how people travel and confound predictions that battery-powered vehicles will have a limited impact on oil demand in the coming decades.

Most forecasters see the shift away from oil in transport as an incremental process guided by slow improvements in the cost and capacity of batteries and progressive tightening of emissions standards. But big economic shifts are rarely that straightforward, said Tim Harford, the economist behind a book and BBC radio series on historic innovations that disrupted the economy.

Systemic Change

"These things are a lot more complicated," he said. Rather than electric motors gradually replacing internal combustion engines within the existing model, there's probably going to be "some degree of systemic change."

That's what happened 10 years ago. The iPhone didn't just offer people a new way to make phone calls; it created an entirely new economy for multibillion-dollar companies like Angry Birds maker Rovio Entertainment Oy or WhatsApp Inc. The fundamental nature of the mobile phone business changed and incumbents like Nokia and BlackBerry Ltd. were replaced by Apple and makers of Android handsets like Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.

Today, as Elon Musk's Tesla and established automakers like are striving to make their electric cars desirable consumer products, companies like and Lyft Inc. are turning transport into an on-demand service and Waymo is testing fully autonomous vehicles on the streets of California and Arizona.

Combine all three, for example through an Alphabet investment in Lyft, and you have a new model of transport as a service that would be a cheap compelling alternative to traditional car ownership, according to RethinkX, a think tank that analyzes technology-driven disruption.

One key advantage of electric cars is the lack of mechanical complexity, which makes them more suitable for the heavy use allowed by driverless technology, Francesco Starace, chief executive officer of Enel SpA, Italy's largest utility, said in an interview. "I don't see driverless being pushed into internal combustion engine" vehicles, he said.

After disassembling General Motors's Chevrolet Bolt, UBS Group AG concluded it required almost no maintenance, with the electric motor having just three moving parts compared with 133 in a four-cylinder internal combustion engine.

"Competitiveness very much depends on the utilization of the car," Laszlo Varro, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said in an interview. The average Uber vehicle covers a third more distance than the typical middle-class family car in Europe, amplifying the benefit of lower running costs to the point that "the oil price at which it makes sense to switch to electric is $30 per barrel lower," he said.

Uber on Steroids

The total cost of ownership of electric and oil-fueled vehicles will reach parity in 2020 for shared-mobility fleets, five years earlier than for individually-owned vehicles, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Already in London, Uber plans for its UberX service to be hybrid or fully electric by the end of 2019. Its rival Lyft aims to provide at least 1 billion rides a year in autonomous electric vehicles by 2025, saying they can be used much more efficiently than gasoline-powered cars.

Autonomous Hurdles

The transition to fully autonomous fleets may not match the speed of the smartphone revolution because of the many regulatory, legal, ethical and behavioral hurdles. Self-driving technology should become available in the 2020s, but won't be widely adopted until 2030, BNEF says.

Even so, the shift to electric cars could displace about 8 million barrels a day of oil demand by 2040, more than the 7 million barrels a day Saudi Arabia exports today, the London-based researcher says. That could have a significant impact on oil prices-a drop of 1.7 million barrels a day in global consumption during the 2008-2009 financial crisis caused prices to slump from $146 a barrel to $36.

Even if electric vehicles do grow as rapidly as BNEF forecasts, the world currently consumes 95 million barrels a day and other sources of demand will keep growing, said Spencer Dale, BP's chief economist. The London-based energy giant expects battery-powered cars to reduce oil demand by just 1 million barrels a day by 2035, while also acknowledging the potential for a much larger impact if the industry has an iPhone moment.

The sheer breadth of the potential disruption makes it hard to predict what will happen. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, few people anticipated that it meant trouble for makers of everything from cameras to chewing gum.

"The smartphone and its apps made new business models possible," said Tony Seba, a Stanford University economist and one of the founders of RethinkX. "The mix of sharing, electric and driverless cars could disrupt everything from parking to insurance, oil demand and retail."

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How Electric Cars Can Create the Biggest Disruption Since the iPhone

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It's been 10 years since Apple Inc. unleashed a surge of innovation that upended the mobile phone industry. Electric cars, with a little help from ride-hailing and self-driving technology, could be about to pull the same trick on Big Oil.

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Barely a mile from the southern shore of the Salton Sea - an accidental lake deep in the California desert, a place best known for dust and decay - a massive drill rig stands sentinel over some of the most closely watched ground in American energy.

There's no oil or natural gas here, despite a cluster of Halliburton cement tanks and the hum of a generator slowly pushing a drill bit through thousands of feet of underground rock. Instead, an Australian company is preparing to tap a buried reservoir of salty, superheated water to produce renewable energy - and lithium, a crucial ingredient in electric car batteries.

The $500-million project is finally getting started after years of hype and headlines about the Imperial Valley someday becoming a powerhouse in the fight against climate change. The developer, Controlled Thermal Resources, began drilling its first lithium and geothermal power production well this month, backed by millions of dollars from investors including General Motors.

If the "Hell's Kitchen" project succeeds - still a big "if" - it will be just the second commercial lithium producer in the United States. It will also generate clean electricity around the clock, unlike solar and wind farms that depend on the weather and time of day.

"We know we can do it. Now it's a matter of how well can we do it," said Jim Turner, Controlled Thermal's chief operating officer.

On a hot afternoon last week, hard-hatted workers crowded onto a platform next to the 170-foot derrick, using their hands to remove clumps of clay being coughed up from underground and threatening to slow the drill bit's descent.

Other than that unexpected hitch, the operation was going smoothly. The drill had reached a depth of about 900 feet, on its way to a reservoir that seismic surveys showed would begin at about 4,000 feet, with temperatures of at least 600 degrees Fahrenheit.

The briny water is rich with lithium and other valuable minerals. Controlled Thermal is eager to reach that lucrative deposit.

"If we're lucky, we'll finish [drilling] before 40 days. But you don't know until you actually get down there," Turner said.

There are already 11 geothermal power plants in the area, churning out emissions-free energy for California and Arizona. They take advantage of a natural geothermal hot spot, where heat from the Earth's core radiates outward and warms water trapped in underground rock formations.

Energy companies drill down and bring the superheated water to the surface, where the drop in pressure causes it to "flash" from a liquid to a gas, creating bursts of steam that can turn turbines and generate electricity.

At the end of the process, the brine is injected back underground, replenishing the reservoir. The main byproduct is water vapor.

The technology is expensive, and for years development had ground to a halt. But now California is swimming in cheap solar and wind power, and officials are scrambling for clean-energy resources that can be counted on 24/7, especially after sundown.

California's first new geothermal plant in nearly a decade recently started construction in Mono County. The Imperial Irrigation District, meanwhile, has agreed to buy most of the 50 megawatts of power that Controlled Thermal would initially generate.

Still, the Hell's Kitchen project might not have reached this stage without booming demand for lithium-ion batteries.

General Motors plans to introduce 30 electric vehicle models by 2025 and to stop selling gasoline-fueled cars by 2035, in line with Gov. Gavin Newsom's target for California. Ford expects to invest $22 billion in EVs over the next few years, including the all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck. Overall, Consumer Reports says nearly 100 battery-electric cars are set to debut by 2024.

As prices have fallen, batteries have also become popular among utility companies looking to balance out solar and wind power, and among homes looking for blackout insurance. There are already 60,000 residential batteries in California, and that number is expected to grow substantially as the electric grid is battered by more extreme fires and storms fueled by climate change.

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Those energy storage systems will require huge amounts of lithium. Industry data provider Benchmark Mineral Intelligence projects that demand for the metal - sometimes known as "white gold" - will grow from 429,000 tons this year to 2.37 million tons in 2030.

Today, most of the world's lithium comes from destructive evaporation ponds in South America and hard-rock mines in Australia. Proposals for new lithium mines in the United States - including the Thacker Pass project on federal land in Nevada and plans for drilling just outside Death Valley National Park - face fierce opposition from conservationists and Native American tribes.

The Imperial Valley resource, by comparison, could offer vast new lithium supplies with few environmental drawbacks.

"It's a whole new industry, it's a whole new tax base, it's a whole new sector," Controlled Thermal Chief Executive Rod Colwell said.

Imperial Valley residents are wary of those kinds of promises, thanks to a long history of developers trying and failing to profit from minerals dissolved in the salty waters deep beneath the Salton Sea (which have no connection to the surface lake). Companies have typically been foiled either by poor economics or by the brine's highly corrosive nature.

None of the busts was more dramatic than that of Simbol Materials. The secretive startup claimed to have developed a game-changing lithium extraction technology, catching Elon Musk's attention and prompting Tesla to offer $325 million to buy the company in 2014, as later revealed by the Desert Sun newspaper. Simbol spurned the purchase offer and soon ran out of money.

But it's now looking more likely that at least one company will solve the puzzle.

Controlled Thermal has teamed up with well-funded lithium extraction startup Lilac Solutions, whose backers include Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. San Diego-based EnergySource, which operates the Salton Sea's newest geothermal facility, developed its own extraction technique and expects to start construction on a lithium plant by April 1. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which owns the rest of the region's geothermal fleet, is working toward a lithium demonstration facility with state funding.

Simbol's patents, meanwhile, are now controlled by a joint venture involving major oil producer Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Turner, for one, welcomes the competition. Even if Controlled Thermal succeeds in producing 20,000 tons of lithium hydroxide by 2024 - and eventually as much as 300,000 tons annually - he thinks there will be more than enough demand to go around.

"If all of us made all the lithium we could ever make out of here, it all would get sold into the automotive industry," he said.

To be clear, Controlled Thermal still has obstacles to overcome.

Before the company can secure hundreds of millions of dollars in financing to start building a power plant, it will need a water supply agreement from the Imperial Irrigation District - always a thorny request in a valley whose massive Colorado River water rights are zealously guarded by landowning farmers. An environmental analysis from Imperial County is another prerequisite.

Perhaps most important, Controlled Thermal needs General Motors - or another party - to sign a formal agreement to buy the lithium that Hell's Kitchen would produce. GM recently announced a multimillion-dollar investment in the Australian company, in a deal that gives the auto giant first dibs on the lithium. But that won't be enough for Controlled Thermal to line up construction financing.

Still, the fact that Controlled Thermal is spending $5 million to drill its first production well - with another $5-million well to follow immediately afterward - bodes well for the company's prospects. Turner pointed to GM's investment as a vote of confidence.

"Believe me, GM did their homework," he said.

The Imperial Valley has long been a land of dreamers.

White settlers looked across the harsh, dry landscape at the turn of the 20th century and saw an agricultural empire. They built that empire - which today comprises half a million acres of farm fields - despite an early incident in which the Colorado River overran an irrigation canal and flowed for two years into the low-lying Salton Sink, creating California's largest lake.

The Salton Sea later became a postcard-perfect resort mecca frequented by Frank Sinatra.

It's also a place where dreams go to die.

The resorts were abandoned after tropical storms and farm runoff caused the Salton Sea to flood.

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Later, the shoreline began to recede as farmers were pressured into selling water to coastal cities, exposing a lakebed covered in dust laced with agricultural pesticides and heavy metals. Fierce winds have increasingly blown that toxic dust into the air breathed by the Imperial Valley's largely Latino, low-income population, fueling an asthma crisis.

Efforts to restore the Salton Sea's fish and migratory bird habitat have consistently faltered.

The Hell's Kitchen project nods to that history, the good and the bad. It's named for a restaurant and dance hall built by a colorful character known as Captain Charles Davis atop a dormant volcano called Mullet Island in 1908, just after the Salton Sea formed.

A century later, the island has become a peninsula as the water recedes. Only ruins of the long-gone restaurant remain.

Today's energy companies hope to stick around longer than Captain Davis. With California aiming for 100% clean electricity and a carbon-neutral economy by 2045, they have good odds of turning their dreams into reality. Now they have to stick the landing.

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Drilling for 'white gold' is happening right now at the Salton Sea

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Barely a mile from the southern shore of the Salton Sea - an accidental lake deep in the California desert, a place best known for dust and decay - a massive drill rig stands sentinel over some of the most closely watched ground in American energy.

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You're Thinking About Home Heating Wrong

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You're Thinking About Home Heating Wrong

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Heat Pumps!

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Getting a heat pump is one of the easiest ways for homeowners to fight climate change.

Getty / The Atlantic

If you're like me, you know that getting rid of your car is one of the best things you can do for the climate, and also that you will never do it. This is a car-oriented country, and a car-oriented time. But in 2019, the private cars and light trucks that ordinary people drive for work and shopping and leisure were responsible for about 15 percent of U.S. fossil-fuel-energy use. Electric vehicles get a lot of press, but less than 1 percent of energy used for transportation came from electricity. Personal transportation is a large contributor to carbon emissions in America; it's also the hardest to give up.

But trading a gasoline automobile for an electric one (or for a bus or train) isn't the only way ordinary citizens can contribute to fossil-fuel reduction. Decarbonization has two pillars: First, generate electricity from energy that does not emit carbon-renewable sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal instead of fossil fuels. That requires legislative and regulatory change. Second, use electricity to run as much of your personal life as possible.

That's where ordinary people like you and me can contribute. At least 7 percent of U.S. fossil-fuel energy is used for something fairly banal: residential space and water heating. Put differently, making relatively smaller, cheaper, and easy changes to home heating in America could reduce fossil-fuel use nearly as much as taking half of all private vehicles off the roads. If you want to do the most immediate good for the planet, replace your aging gas furnace with a new, electric appliance.

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You can heat a building in many ways. A boiler heats water and cycles it through radiators that heat rooms. A furnace transfers heat to air, which it then pushes through vents into living spaces.

Most American homes run these devices by burning fossil fuels. Depending on your geographic location and the age of your home and its systems, those fuels might include distillate fuel oil (mostly still used in the Northeast), propane (common in rural areas), or natural gas (common everywhere else). Every one of these releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when burned.

But boilers and furnaces aren't your only options. Instead of heating the air, heat pumps move heat from one place to another by converting a substance called refrigerant between its liquid and gas forms. Your refrigerator is a heat pump. So is an air conditioner. Both of those devices pump heat in reverse: Warm air is absorbed by the refrigerant coils and pumped out. Your fridge and AC unit move heat in only one direction. But a heat pump can do both, meaning that the same appliance can heat in the winter-even in very cold climates-and cool in the summer. ("Heat pump" is a terrible, confusing name for these gadgets.)

Heat pumps have been around for decades, but they didn't used to be very efficient, especially in extremely cold weather. That's changing. Now some cold-climate heat pumps can transfer heat effectively in subzero temperatures. An oil- or gas-fueled furnace (or other backup heat sources) might be required on the coldest days, but on all the others, your heat can be electric.

In Maine, the lack of natural-gas infrastructure made it easy for the state to encourage electrification of home heating. Central air is uncommon in the state, and installing a heat pump adds cool air-conditioning for free. Maine's electricity grid is already very clean, and these new heat-pump devices are much more efficient than window AC units.

Michael Stoddard, the executive director of the Efficiency Maine Trust, the state's energy-efficiency organization, told me that more than 60,000 heat pumps have been sold to Mainers in the past seven years. Some Mainers have been burned by the high cost of heating oil, a commodity whose price fluctuates. State-sponsored consumer-rebate programs, including one that offers up to $1,500 back on purchases of heat pumps, has also driven recent adoption of the devices. Stoddard worried that participation in the state's incentive programs might dry up because people wouldn't want to spend the money during the pandemic. "Instead, participation has doubled," he said. People were stuck at home, some with extra money to spare, given their stimulus benefits and reduced spending. And parts of Maine can still reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.

Does carbon reduction itself motivate Mainers to adopt heat pumps? "I'm confident the answer is that it is evolving," Stoddard hedged. But even if residents aren't making green-energy choices with decarbonization in mind, the success of incentive programs such as the Efficiency Maine Trust's have helped the state advance more aggressive policy proposals. In the weeks prior to our conversation, Stoddard told me, Maine had just completed a new climate action plan, and decarbonizing heating systems was among its top three mitigation recommendations. "Now you have everybody talking about this as if it's just a thing we have to get going on," he said.

Elsewhere, switching to a heat pump is a tougher sell. Natural gas pollutes less than distillate, and it doesn't suffer the commodity-price fluctuations that have helped shift homeowners off heating oil in the Northeast. And more than 60 percent of the U.S. residential market already has air-conditioning, according to Paul Camuti, the chief technology and strategy officer at Trane Technologies, which manufactures HVAC systems. That means the benefit of added air-conditioning from a heat-pump switchover doesn't apply to many American homeowners.

Even so, electric utilities have strong incentives to move homeowners to electric heat: They can sell them more electricity, for one thing. And they can realize their own decarbonization goals more rapidly. For both of these reasons, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) in central California has adopted some of the country's most aggressive rebate incentives for heat pumps, as much as $3,000 on heat-pump space heaters and $2,500 on heat-pump water heaters. According to Scott Blunk, SMUD's strategic business planner of electrification and energy efficiency, the incentives can make the payback almost immediate.

The water-heating program has been the most popular, probably because the incentive provides the most benefit at the lowest cost to homeowners and contractors. Electrifying water and space heating is still unfamiliar to many people, and Blunk speculated that giving them a reason to try the technology might warm them up, as it were, to other gas-to-electric conversions. Heat-pump space heating is entirely viable in central California, where the temperature doesn't drop below freezing that often. Even without the incentives, replacing an air-conditioning unit and a furnace with one heat pump can save a lot of money in the long run, since the heat pump can do the job of both.

As was the case in Maine, Sacramento is leveraging the success of its electrification programs to shift corporate strategy and state policy. The energy code for 2023 is currently being developed in California, and it is making the rollout of electric devices easier. Adjusting the baselines of reasonable energy need can make room for electrifying more home devices. And making electric-appliance installations easier for builders encourages them to recommend cleaner appliances. In addition to reducing carbon emissions directly, every heat-pump installation has an incremental effect on the viability of policy changes.

You don't have to get rid of your old appliances right away, either. "To hit our decarbonization goals, we don't need to take out someone's perfectly good water heater," Blunk told me. "We just need to replace it with an electric one when it goes out." That's an easier pill to swallow for homeowners, who can think of the incremental cost of electric conversions as a small premium over the money they were going to spend on a replacement device anyway. Rebates and incentives sweeten the deal.

Sacramento power burns no coal, and runs roughly 50 percent carbon-free, thanks in large part to hydroelectric power. Blunk calculates that a new-construction home on the grid might reduce its carbon output from 2.5 to 1.1 tons of carbon a year, and a 1978 home's could drop from 5.2 to 2.5 tons. Because 80 percent of the region uses natural gas for space and water heating, electrification could substantially reduce fossil-fuel use there.

Unfortunately, many Americans still don't trust electric and renewable sources for heating. Some blamed Texas's widespread outages during a severe storm this month on the failure of wind turbines, but that's not right: The state still relies largely on natural-gas energy for electricity. And even gas-burning furnaces require electricity to work, making those appliances no less unreliable if the power goes out for an extended time, as it did across much of the state. Amid climate change, gas isn't an answer so much as just another problem. "Electrifying buildings and vehicles while switching to climate-safe clean electricity while adapting our infrastructure to a changing climate will be deeply challenging," David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, told me. "But relying on gas in a changing climate would also be deeply challenging." Electric power is fundamental to everything we do, making widespread reform of the grid and the tools that use it even more urgent.

Instead, we expend energy glorifying electric cars. For this year's Super Bowl, General Motors spent millions on a star-studded ad celebrating its ambitious electric-vehicle plans. It was surprising, but not out of place. Less surprisingly, no heat-pump ads aired during the big game. Even if trust in the grid can be improved, electric heat faces one big problem: Transitioning off natural gas just isn't as sexy as solar panels or electric cars. Unless you're a contractor or an HVAC nerd, you probably don't think much about your heating and cooling systems. They are hidden in attics and basements and utility closets, tucked away on roofs or in side yards. These machines go almost entirely unconsidered unless they break down. Nobody shows off their new water heater when friends come over the way they might show off a Tesla in the garage.

Unlike solar panels, clean upgrades to home appliances also don't produce social-signaling benefits-the neighbors can't gawk at your greener home, and you can't take pride in passersby noticing it. How do you make a heat pump sexy? "I don't know," Blunk admitted. "I think the closest we have is cooking." He means the blue flame of a stove, the only place in the home where a resident can see and hear and feel natural gas at work. Stove-top cooking is so essential to justifying home gas service, the fossil-fuel industry has poured resources into preserving the appliances' appeal.

Even SMUD's executives felt protective of kitchen gas. "You're never going to get rid of my gas stove," Blunk recalled them saying. So he bought them portable induction-cooking units (a kind of electric stove that transfers heat directly to cookware) to demonstrate that modern electric cooking heat wasn't like the old wire coils they might remember from the 1950s.

Natural-gas cooking is responsible for only 2 percent of residential natural-gas use-far less than space and water heating. Still, converting from a gas cooktop to an electric-induction one can have a substantial, if different, impact. For one part, there are health benefits: Igniting open-gas fires in your home produces pollution that can exacerbate asthma. But from a sustainability perspective, the kitchen is the place where people develop an emotional relationship to natural gas. The blue flame lapping over the sturdy cast-iron grates imparts a sense of power and control to cooking, just as the rumble of a carburetor on a muscle car does to driving.

That makes the induction cooktop the Tesla of the natural-gas-decarbonization movement. It's the device you can brag about while also showing your friends and family that electricity is just as good as gas for cooking, if not better. "When I first got my induction," Blunk told me, "I had a party and invited all my friends over."

Brian Keane has built a whole organization around that idea. SmartPower, a nonprofit renewable-energy outreach and marketing company, helps municipalities and utilities get their citizens and customers interested in clean energy. "Americans listen to what friends and co-workers are doing. That's the pressure point," Keane told me. And when it comes to energy, once you've taken action, whether that be installing a smart thermostat or replacing a combustion furnace, the best thing to do is tell a friend or colleague that you've done it. This is particularly important for renewable energy in the home, Keane said, because no brand name is associated with it. Nobody knows what furnace or water heater they have. "There's no Coca Cola, no Pepsi."

SmartPower has run a series of marketing campaigns for solar adoption around the country, many of which amount to better-funded and more-formal versions of Blunk's induction-stove house party. Sometimes they hold block parties when the panels go up on the first roof in a neighborhood, or host house parties with a utility-bill reveal (really!). People used to want to wait for a technology to be widespread, but Keane thinks that lifestyle-technology turnover has entered the home. "Apple is always coming out with a new iPhone," he tells homeowners; a water heater is no different. "You could keep waiting, or just buy this one. It'll work for 20 years." Averaging across campaigns, SmartPower's solar programs were found to increase the rate of solar adoptions in a municipality by nearly 1,000 percent.

Camuti, the Trane HVAC-equipment executive, agrees that the change in perception about heating and cooling in the past decade has been dramatic. "I relate this directly to the availability of online information," he told me. People still ask dealers, tradespeople, or contractors what they should buy, which makes upstream incentives from states and utilities to those agents extremely important. "But people go online and ask if there is a better choice," Camuti said. "We are starting to have a relationship with them."

There are some lessons for homeowners. First, there is benefit in advocating for home upgrades on your block, at your workplace, and in your family. Some people are interested in clean energy for its own sake, but many more are motivated by doing something beneficial for their communities. And emissions reductions positively impact a local environment before the global one. Second, lower-impact but more-visible upgrades, such as induction cooktops or solar water heaters, might become the gateway to abandoning natural gas. Nobody thought they wanted or needed an internet-connected thermostat before Nest came on the scene, after all. But it was stylish and functional, and many smart-home rollouts began from that unlikely start.

If you're building a new home, it's easier to skip natural gas entirely. Not running a gas line will save thousands of dollars, and it will prevent you from ever installing gas-burning appliances. But for existing homes, you should abandon the idea that a solar roof or an electric car is the only path forward. Replace your gas cooktop and show it off to friends, or on Instagram. Blog or podcast or post on Facebook about it, so that human experiences will come up in search results when people go hunting for their own products. If your gas furnace or air conditioner or water heater is near the end of its lifespan, replace it with a heat pump. And if not, plan to do so when it conks out. If you live in a large population center, do these things sooner, because your action will send faster signals to utilities and governments that the tide is turning. If you want to do your part to reduce carbon emissions, do what you can to wean yourself off the gas you use in your home, not just the kind you put in your car.

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executive director of the efficiency maine trust

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You're Thinking About Home Heating Wrong

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Getting a heat pump is one of the easiest ways for homeowners to fight climate change. If you're like me, you know that getting rid of your car is one of the best things you can do for the climate, and also that you will never do it.

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Coal's grip on the global electricity sector is loosening as more utilities and companies invest in renewable energy. But one major coal consumer - the steel industry - is finding it harder to kick its habit.

Steel companies make nearly 2 billion tons of high-strength material every year for bridges, buildings, railways, and roads. The furnaces that melt iron ore to make steel consume vast amounts of coal. As a result, the industry accounts for roughly 8 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions, as well as a toxic soup of air pollutants.

Steelmakers worldwide are facing mounting pressure from government regulators and consumers to decarbonize operations. Doing so is essential to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and staving off most of the worst effects of climate change, experts say. In recent months, the world's three top producers - Europe's ArcelorMittal, China's Baowu Steel, and Japan's Nippon Steel - committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, echoing targets set in their home countries.

But in order to curb steel's carbon emissions, the sector will have to transform how the material is traditionally made.

Outside Boston, in the industrial suburb of Woburn, one company is working to replace coal with electrons. Boston Metal, an outfit spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, uses electric currents to heat iron ore into a bright orange-white liquid, which converts into metal and cools as gray steel blocks. The process doesn't create greenhouse gas emissions, and when powered with renewable electricity, can be completely emissions-free.

Tadeu Carneiro, the company's CEO, said Boston Metal is "ushering in a new era of metallurgy." The nine-year-old startup raised $50 million in January from a slew of investors, including the Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the venture capital arm of BHP, one of the world's biggest mining companies. The new funding will allow it to build a demonstration plant in Woburn that can produce 25,000 tons of metal per year; so far, the company has made only several tons of steel in total.

Boston Metal's approach is one of a handful of breakthrough technologies with the potential to decarbonize steelmaking. Companies are piloting systems across Europe that use hydrogen in furnaces in lieu of coal. In Brazil, some steel mills are mixing in biochar, which is made from agricultural waste. Other firms are continuing the use of coal, but are considering retrofitting facilities with carbon capture devices to negate emissions.

Testing and scaling technologies that remove the emissions from steelmaking isn't the only challenge to decarbonizing the building material. Greener products must also compete in an industry with relatively low profit margins and an excess supply of inexpensive Chinese steel.

To level the playing field, public agencies and private businesses will need to set policies that encourage buying emissions-free steel, or make it more expensive to purchase conventional supplies, said Nate Aden, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute who studies industrial sector transformations. ( California, for instance, limits the total amount of carbon emissions associated with steel and other materials used in state-backed construction projects.)

"We haven't had nearly enough research and development in this space for the past couple decades," Aden said. "It's exciting."

About 70 percent of steel today is made how it's always been made: in giant, extremely hot furnaces. Purified coal, or "coke," is heated and melted with iron oxide and limestone, then injected with oxygen to reduce the carbon content of the mixture and to remove impurities.

Almost all other steel is made from scrap metal that's melted down in an electric arc furnace. This approach doesn't use coke as a raw material. But it does require significant amounts of electricity to heat metal to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit - and most of that power comes from coal-fired power plants.

At Boston Metal's research facility, the steelmaking process takes place inside a squat metal cylinder called an electrolytic cell. Electricity is fed in from the top and flows through a chimney-like tube made from a chromium-based alloy. The electric current then passes across a liquid solution made of iron oxide and other metallic minerals. This heats the oxide melt and drives chemical reactions that result in the production of oxygen gas and liquid iron. Oxygen bubbles to the top, while fortified iron pools at the chamber's bottom and eventually hardens into steel.

Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at MIT, said he first got the idea for "molten oxide electrolysis" decades ago while researching alternative ways to produce aluminum, another metal made via a carbon-intensive process. In 2012, he co-founded Boston Electrometallurgical (a.k.a. Boston Metal) with two partners, and they began testing the method in laboratory cells the size of highball tumbler glasses. The company now runs three pilot lines at the Woburn facility.

With the $50 million investment from Breakthrough, BHP, and others, Sadoway said the goal is to demonstrate the technology at a scale large enough to convince investors to back construction of an industrial facility. If that future plant comes to fruition, he estimates Boston Metal's process will use about 20 percent less energy than a conventional blast furnace. And if the facility can use cheap, plentiful renewable electricity, perhaps from a hydropower plant, its steel would cost less than the competition.

"At scale, we expect to make better metal at lower cost and with no CO2 emissions," he said.

As Boston Metal expands its efforts in electrolysis, many steel companies are placing their bets on hydrogen to curb emissions.

Hydrogen doesn't emit greenhouse gases when burned and can be made by using renewable electricity to bust up water molecules (although most hydrogen today is made with natural gas, through a process called steam methane reforming). In steelmaking, hydrogen sets off a chemical reaction that removes oxygen from iron ore, eliminating the need for purified coal in the blast furnace.

Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal is building a demonstration plant using this method - called hydrogen-DRI, for "direct reduced iron" - in Germany. Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries plans to trial the technology this year at a 250,000-ton per year steel plant in Austria. And in Sweden, steelmaker SSAB and its partners have built a pilot plant to produce hydrogen supplies and test hydrogen-DRI, using only hydroelectric power for both operations.

Building a hydrogen-based steel industry will require significant spending to not only build new plants but also produce, transport, and store green hydrogen. For these projects to be economically viable in the world of cheap steel, the prices of hydrogen and renewable electricity must drop considerably, while the price of carbon dioxide must rise, Aden wrote in a 2020 paper as part of an international team of experts.

There's another longer-term challenge for new, clean projects. Demand for steel is declining or stagnating in key markets, including the United States and Japan. Producers are already making more steel than the world needs. Meanwhile, construction companies and car makers are increasingly using lightweight aluminum, plastics, and even wood in their projects. That could make it harder to justify future investments or research, according to Aden.

Still, the steel industry remains an essential part of the world economy - as well as a significant source of the world's emissions.

"What's clear is that we'll be needing steel for the next few decades," Aden said. "So I think all these new projects are worthwhile."

Will Biden deliver on climate? Get weekly analysis of federal climate policy action in the first months of Biden's term.

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How steel might finally kick its coal habit

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Coal's grip on the global electricity sector is loosening as more utilities and companies invest in renewable energy. But one major coal consumer - the steel industry - is finding it harder to kick its habit. Steel companies make nearly 2 billion tons of high-strength material every year for bridges, buildings, railways, and roads.

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Chicago winter without a furnace or gas bill: Passive houses make it possible and are slowly catching on - Chicago Tribune

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Chicago winter without a furnace or gas bill: Passive houses make it possible and are slowly catching on - Chicago Tribune

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In the 1970s, long before the Prius and Green New Deal, a small group of engineers and architects at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was already going green.

As the U.S. government encouraged energy conservation during the oil crisis, the Small Homes Council applied the approach to home building.

The passive house was born (although it was dubbed "low calorie" at the time).

Canada allegedly holds claim to the first true passive house, then Europe took the idea mainstream before it eventually returned to the U.S. via the Urbana, Ill., Smith House in 2003.

"In a way it's come full circle," said Mike Knezovich, communications director at the Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS), based in Chicago. The organization's co-founder, Katrin Klingenberg, was the brains behind the Urbana prototype.

The idea is simple: airtight construction that leads to energy conservation and, in the ideal scenario, no carbon footprint. This is accomplished with extra insulation, highly efficient windows and an "energy recovery ventilator," which continuously pushes stale air out and brings fresh air in. The end result is a comfortable home with good air quality and far lower utility bills than a traditional build.

But even as the construction industry and homebuyers put more emphasis on eco-friendly building practices - and owners can vouch for the benefits - true passive houses are still relatively rare and have been slow to catch on.

"It's so unsexy," Tom Bassett-Dilley joked about the science behind building passive, noting it doesn't have the same flair as, say, solar power. The Oak Park-based architect, whose firm focuses on sustainable building, completed Chicagoland's first certified passive home in 2012 in River Forest.

To achieve PHIUS certification, a house must meet certain design criteria and energy targets - standards are updated every few years - and pass a variety of assurance/quality control tests administered by a third party. Illinois boasts 19 certified passive houses with an additional 10 under review.

"People always associate energy conservation with sacrifice, I think going back to Jimmy Carter wearing an extra sweater," Knezovich said. "But people that live in them love them."

Mary Chris Jaklevic and her husband, Roy Schuster, worked with Bassett-Dilley to build their Oak Park home in 2010. The couple didn't opt for official certification, but the home was built using passive methodology and functions as such, including the fact that is has no furnace. Heat comes from lighting, the sun, household appliances, cooking and even the residents' bodies. The house isn't even connected to a gas line, a common practice in passive building.

"I think that's one of the big factors that we underestimated was just how comfortable it would be to live in this house. It's a lot quieter because the walls are so thick and the windows are triple-paned," Jaklevic said. She also noted the high air quality and lack of drafts.

Chicago architect Mark Miller, who recently completed his first true passive build in Gull Lake, Mich., said one of the first questions people ask is whether they should worry about fresh air - are they going to suffocate? On the contrary, he said, because of the specialized ventilation system, the air quality is great, and people with allergies or asthma may even notice improvement in their symptoms.

Miller notes energy reduction as another obvious benefit, saying the savings can be upward of 85%. Or if the house were a car, he said, it would get 200 miles per gallon.

And modern efficiencies don't have to mean modern design.

"Because of this misperception that it's a really European thing, there's also a sense that a passive house has to look ... really contemporary and austere," Knezovich said. "That's not true at all, they can look really traditional and pretty much fit into any neighborhood."

Both Knezovich and Miller point to a 2011 American foursquare-style home in Bethesda, Md., that helped bust the myth that passive homes can't look traditional - or even historic.

Bassett-Dilley is retrofitting a Frank Lloyd Wright home in Oak Park, with the hope it will be net-zero upon completion - a term often used incorrectly interchangeably with passive. Net-zero homes produce as much energy as they consume, meaning a net-zero energy bill and a carbon-free home. Many of the same building principles apply.

Passive certification isn't feasible for all renovations, including Bassett-Dilley's Frank Lloyd Wright project.

"It's an incredibly fascinating and challenging project because we have to be very careful about making sure what we do is reversible," he said. "We won't be tearing off historic material or retiring art glass for the sake of some more insulation." He will, however, rely heavily on solar power as the home's energy source.

Bassett-Dilley said Frank Lloyd Wright's style, solar panels and passive houses have one major thing in common: design with nature in mind. How passive houses are constructed varies greatly by climate. A single-family stucco home in hot, dry Phoenix has different needs (and certification requirements) than a brick three-flat in Chicago.

No matter the style, Miller believes many more existing homes should be converted to passive than currently are.

"We have so much housing stock that is performing so poorly, so there is a great opportunity to retrofit our housing stock," he said. And buyers are interested - whether or not they know it.

"Very few people understand or even know or ask for a passive house," said Stephen Chertok, a real estate agent with @properties. But they are asking more about the "essential characteristics" of a passive house, he said. Jaklevic and Schuster were in that camp, wanting an energy-efficient home but not yet familiar with the term "passive house" back in 2010.

Chertok thinks cost is a major barrier - builders without passive experience will often come in with high-priced project bids because the labor and materials aren't as familiar. But for architects and builders knowledgeable about the process, the cost is comparable, according to Knezovich. "People wonder if they can afford passive. The answer is yes," he said.

He and Bassett-Dilley agree that additional up-front cost for things like highly efficient windows and insulation (think 5% to 10% reflected in mortgage payments) is made up for in utility bill savings. Currently, passive certification doesn't grant homeowners a premium on their assessment, but various rebate, grant and loan programs exist in Illinois.

Compared with the building industry at large, the state's passive community is relatively small but mighty. Those at the forefront work hard to spread the mission, including Jaklevic, who claims the title "#passivehouse enthusiast" in her Twitter bio.

"Every time I see a new house going up, I look at the walls and how thin they are, and the windows and how they're not particularly well insulated," she said. "I think, 'Wow that's a lost opportunity.' "

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Chicago winter without a furnace or gas bill: Passive houses make it possible and are slowly catching on

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In the 1970s, long before the Prius and Green New Deal, a small group of engineers and architects at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was already going green. As the U.S. government encouraged energy conservation during the oil crisis, the Small Homes Council applied the approach to home building.

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Green Buildings on a Remote Desert Island

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Green Buildings on a Remote Desert Island

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Green building design on a remote desert island

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A look at green waterfront homes in five destinations around the world.

Feeling green while seeing blue: The interest in environmentally responsible waterfront homes, like Sombras Del Viento in Tulum, Mexico, is on the rise.

Waterfront living brings one closer to the healing blue of oceans, lakes and rivers. But what about helping to actually heal the earth? Experts say interest in waterfront green living may be on the rise.

"Based on my experience and in talking to other realtors, homeowners today who are buying a primary or vacation home by the water are paying more attention to sustainability," said Seth Tilton, a realtor for ERA Evergreen Real Estate Company in Hilton Head, S.C., and a certified expert in sustainable real estate. "There is a lot more awareness about overall wellness than ever before and green living is a part of that."

Most of these buyers gravitate to recently built homes, Mr. Tilton said, because they're more likely to be eco-friendly than older ones. "A property that's 20 or 30 years old doesn't usually incorporate sustainability, unless it has been extensively renovated, because there wasn't as much awareness on the topic back then," he said.

Features of a green home may include solar panels that supply heat and air conditioning, energy efficient appliances, LED lighting, and insulated windows and walls that minimize energy use. Waterfront homes might also include recycled shells or colorful tiles as part of the construction adding an eco-friendly warmth and sense of place.

Here is a look at green waterfront homes in five destinations around the world.

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Palmetto Bluff, a coastal community in Bluffton, S.C.

Price $2.95 million

About 35 minutes by car from Savannah, Ga., this home is part of Palmetto Bluff, a 20,000-acre coastal community and nature conserve with a focus on sustainability and environmental education. In 2003, the owners established the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy, a nonprofit that protects the diverse ecosystem of wetlands, forests and wildlife like white-tailed deer, wild turkeys and gray foxes.

Once the project is complete, more than half of the community's land will be in a conservation easement never to be developed. Every Palmetto Bluff home has eco-friendly features and amenities including ample green spaces and footpaths; multiple fitness centers, restaurants, a dog park and spa; and more than a dozen land and water activities such as fishing, sporting clays and boating.

Size 5,489 square feet

The Home The home, with five bedrooms and baths and two half baths, is in Palmetto Bluff's River Road neighborhood, characteristic for its classic residences and adjacent to a 120-acre preserve. It's light and bright with a white color theme and overlooks the inland waterway. The entry-level includes a sprawling living room with high ceilings, an open kitchen, a second back kitchen and the master suite.

An additional three bedrooms are on the second floor while a fourth bedroom, with a sitting area and kitchenette, is above the three-car garage. Sustainable features include energy-efficient appliances and heating system, green construction and paving materials and insulation that's designed to minimize the use of heat and air conditioning.

Outdoor Space The back has a large screened porch, and the landscape design is comprised mostly of native trees such as magnolias.

Taxes $15,009 a year for primary homeowners; $42,692 a year for secondary homeowners

Price $2.3 million

This home, called Villa Laterite, is in Sasawane, a coastal village in Alibag, a three-hour drive south of Mumbai. It was built in 2018 and sits just over 600 feet away from the sea. The area, a popular second home and vacation spot for Mumbai residents, is known for its scenic beaches; excellent, inexpensive seafood; and cultural sites such as historic Kolaba Fort.

Size 5,543 square feet

The Home Spanning three levels, the villa has three bedrooms and baths and a contemporary Indian aesthetic of dark Burmese teak woods mixed with gold finishes and colorful patterned tiles. High ceilings and natural light are a feature throughout. A large living and dining room, kitchen and bedroom are on the entry-level while the floor above has two more bedrooms and a family room. The third level has an uncovered tiled terrace.

Villa Laterite has solar water heaters and LED lights, and a generator on hand as a power backup. Three wells, along with a rainwater harvesting system, supply the home with water.

Outdoor Space The home is built on more than an acre of land and the property is lush with native trees including mango, lemon, papaya and guava. It also has spacious lawn, a produce garden, a lap pool and multiple decks.

Price $399,000

This apartment, in an upscale seaside resort development in Andalusia, on Spain's southeast coast, is part of a residential community that's scheduled to be completed in November. Located in the heart of Sotogrande's vibrant marina, the community consists of two buildings, one with eight apartments and the other with 56; this property is in the latter. All residences have electric heaters that supply hot water using thermal solar energy, energy-efficient appliances, LED lighting, and walls and roofing with thermal insulation that cut down on the use of heat and air conditioning.

Amenities within the community include a pool and multiple green areas with native plants. The beach, five golf courses and activities such as horseback riding, tennis and sailing are a short walk away.

Size 1,119 square feet

The Home The apartment, which includes two bedrooms and two baths, has an airy feel and contemporary style that includes light wood finishes. The kitchen is long and narrow and opens to the living and dining area as well as a hallway leading to the two bedrooms and baths. The master bathroom has two sinks, and both baths have large showers.

Outdoor Space There's a spacious terrace off the living room with unobstructed views of the marina and the Mediterranean Sea. The terrace can also be accessed from the master bedroom.

Taxes $1,143 a year

Price $2.6 million

This three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath home is in the coastal Los Angeles neighborhood of Marina del Rey, known for its namesake harbor and vibrant seaside restaurants. The property is a block from the harbor in one of the few areas close to the water that has single-family homes; direct waterfront properties in Marina del Rey are mostly apartments and condominiums.

Size 2,304 square feet

The Home Split into three levels, the home has a dramatic entryway with a glass wall and two-story ceiling. Common spaces including the kitchen and living and dining rooms are on the entry floor, while the bedrooms are on the second level and a spacious covered roof garden is on the third. Sustainable features include energy efficient appliances and solar energy that heats the home and supplies hot water.

Outdoor Space Akin to a tropical rainforest, the space offers an abundance of palm and bird of paradise trees. In front of the home, there's also a fire pit, spacious patio and lily pond. There's a smaller slate patio in the back with a barbecue and waterfall spa. A drip irrigation system waters plants slowly, a feature designed to save water.

Taxes Around $2,750 a month

Price $2.5 million

Called Sombras Del Viento, or Shadows of the Wind, this home is on a long stretch of beach near Tulum, in a nature reserve between a rainforest and a bay. With seven bedrooms and baths, it has views of the Caribbean from most vantage points, both in and outdoors. Several restaurants and a grocery store are within walking distance of the property, and Tulum is less than a 10-minute drive away.

Size 7,534 square feet

The Home The villa is constructed from concrete and has marble and granite finishes. It's divided into three sections: One with a large kitchen, living room, game room with sea views and a pool table and four bedrooms, including the master suite; another with two bedrooms and a second kitchen; and a third with a bedroom and an additional kitchen. High ceilings and oversized windows flood the home with natural light.

Eco-friendly elements include solar power, a rainwater collection system that supplies the home with water and energy-efficient appliances.

Outdoor Space Shadows of the Wind has a front area with two large pools, a barbecue and a tropical garden brimming with palm and coconut trees. The back offers a spacious terrace with a sitting area and bar that's accessible from the living room. Every bedroom opens onto a terrace, several of which are wraparound.

Taxes: $1,800 a year.

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Where Blue Meets Green: Sustainable Waterfront Homes

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A look at green waterfront homes in five destinations around the world. Waterfront living brings one closer to the healing blue of oceans, lakes and rivers. But what about helping to actually heal the earth? Experts say interest in waterfront green living may be on the rise.

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Is Solar Too Cheap?

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Solar panels atop a home in Brooklyn. Home solar installations, measured by their power capacity, grew 17 percent last year. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Some companies are having trouble surviving and making money installing panels because of intense competition and the high costs of doing business.

Solar panels atop a home in Brooklyn. Home solar installations, measured by their power capacity, grew 17 percent last year. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The home solar business is growing fast as thousands of homeowners install panels on their roofs to save money. Yet the biggest companies that install and finance home solar systems are reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Those losses are an ominous reminder of how hard it can be to make money in an industry widely viewed by political leaders and business executives as an important part of the global effort to address climate change. Solving this problem could help determine whether the use of residential solar power is quickly and widely adopted.

"There have been very few success stories," said Vikram Aggarwal, founder and chief executive of EnergySage, which helps consumers compare solar installers. "Practically everyone who has tried this has failed. The road is littered with dead bodies."

Sunrun and Sunnova, two of the nation's biggest home solar companies, lost a combined $500 million in the first nine months of the year, and their operations and purchases of solar systems collectively used up $1.3 billion in cash. The companies and their Wall Street supporters say the losses are occurring because solar installations are growing rapidly and require a lot of upfront investment, and because investors in the companies get to use the losses to offset their tax liabilities. Still, residential solar is a fiercely competitive and expensive business, and Sunrun and Sunnova must contend with hundreds of smaller rivals, many of which have been turning a profit for years.

For now, Wall Street investors are bidding up the companies' stocks in the belief that solar companies will be able to borrow cheaply and cover their losses and cash outflows for some time. They also expect sales to grow fast as homeowners buy larger solar systems and home batteries to protect themselves from blackouts and to power electric vehicles. Investors are also expecting the incoming Biden administration to do more to spur the use of renewable energy through tax credits and other incentives.

"You are always going to be negative if you are growing," Lynn Jurich, chief executive of Sunrun, said in an interview. Sunrun acquired Vivint, which was the country's second-biggest residential solar installer, in a deal announced in July. That acquisition has helped push Sunrun's stock was up over 400 percent in 2020. Sunnova's stock was up over 300 percent.

The success of the two companies and Tesla's solar business, once the leading residential solar installer, matters beyond the stock market. If these companies grow and gain the same sort of name recognition that Tesla did for its luxury electric cars, or Amazon did for online shopping, they could help accelerate a shift away from fossil fuels.

New home solar installations, measured by their power capacity, are expected to grow 7 percent this year despite the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie, a research and consulting firm. Wood Mackenzie expects strong growth over the next five years.

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Workers install Sunrun solar panels at a home in Carlsbad, Calif. Sunrun is one of the large companies that install and finance home solar systems that are reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Credit... Collin Chappelle for The New York Times

"We're having discussions as a management team about how much growth we can handle," W. John Berger, chief executive of Sunnova, said in an interview. "I'll take that problem any day of the week because I've had the other problem, as well," he added.

But for all that optimism, installing solar in homes is clearly not an easy business. Solar companies that grow too fast often struggle, as SolarCity did before Tesla acquired it in 2016. Many others have sought bankruptcy protection or have gone out of business in recent years.

Dozens of companies like SunEdison, which tried to acquire Vivint in 2016, grew incredibly fast and abruptly stumbled. SunEdison sought bankruptcy protection that same year. Hundreds of smaller residential solar businesses have also failed, according to EnergySage.

It is not clear if it makes economic sense for the solar business to be dominated by national operators like Sunrun and Sunnova. Hundreds of small installers around the United States have already figured out how to make money from what they describe as the kind of home improvement business that local firms typically dominate.

"Solar is sort of this magical technology, and it's very alluring, and everyone wants to think it's different from everything else," said T.R. Ludwig, one of the founders of Brooklyn SolarWorks and a former Sunrun employee. "But, apart from the financing, it really is a construction project."

His firm buys solar panels through buyer collectives to get lower prices. It does not offer customers financing like Sunrun or Sunnova, but that's not a disadvantage, Mr. Ludwig said, because many banks and credit unions are willing to make solar loans.

Mr. Ludwig contends that the solar business is more like the heating, ventilation and air-conditioner business, which is made up of local firms installing and servicing products made by national or global manufacturers.

"As a small business, you have to profit - you can't go to the markets to get capital like the big companies can," said Stephen Irvin, chief executive of Amicus Solar Collective, which helps Brooklyn SolarWorks and other small installers buy panels.

But Wall Street analysts contend that Sunrun and Sunnova's ability to borrow lots of money should allow them to offer cheaper financing and potentially earn bigger profits.

"Size becomes a barrier to entry to others," said Sophie Karp, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Wall Street analysts said the companies' accounting could understate profitability. Like homeowners who buy solar panels, investors can gain tax advantages. Investors in Sunrun's business, for instance, can use the losses there to reduce their tax bills. And when the losses borne by the investors are excluded, the company's loss is much smaller.

Analysts also say Sunrun and Sunnova's business will be profitable over time. They charge customers monthly to lease solar systems or buy the electricity that those systems generate. The idea is that over the life of a system - about 25 years - the companies will earn a lot more in monthly fees than they spend installing panels and batteries, which they tend to buy from factories in Asia.

"There is a good business here," said Joseph Osha, an equity research analyst with JMP Securities. "The financials are tremendously complex."

What is not in dispute is that interest in solar appears to be growing, partly because of forces unleashed by the pandemic.

As people have spent more time at home, some have realized that solar panels could help them reduce monthly energy costs while protecting them against blackouts. Recent wildfires in the West and a record hurricane season in the East have increased interest in solar and battery systems.

In addition, solar executives hope that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will push for an extension of subsidies like the federal tax credit that ends Dec. 31, 2023.

The Solar Energy Industries Association is pushing the incoming administration to provide the same benefit for residential solar as for larger scale solar, which would allow a continuing 10 percent tax credit after current subsidies expire. The association also wants a tax credit for energy storage.

Industry officials also argue that they are working hard to reduce expenses so they can break even sooner. Solar systems typically cost two or three times more in the United States than in other industrialized nations like Australia, partly because U.S. companies spend more time and money on securing building permits and on marketing.

The pandemic appears to have alleviated another big concern - that, in a recession, many solar customers would stop making payments. There has been no surge in defaults this year, probably because most homeowners who install panels are relatively well off and have not been hit hard.

Keiron Clarke, a worker for Brooklyn SolarWorks, installing panels at a home in Brooklyn. The firm, which serves New York City, buys solar panels through buyer collectives to get lower prices. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

"Now we have lived through one hell of a recession - and the payment performance was phenomenal," said Mr. Berger, the Sunnova chief executive. "The market's digesting this and going, 'Wow, this is a lot less risky than we thought.'"

A year and a half ago, David Jacobs bought a solar system from Sunnova. Now entering his second full winter with the system, he's relieved. He had been spending up to $800 a month on electricity in the winter, largely to run the heating system at his home in Niantic, Conn.

"I was getting these outrageous electric bills," said Mr. Jacobs, a 75-year-old retired structural engineer. "I said this was unsustainable."

Mr. Jacobs now makes two fixed monthly payments: $163 to Sunnova and $23 to his electric utility.

Solar industry organizations like Rewiring America, a group of engineers, entrepreneurs and volunteers working to address climate change, estimate that the typical American household could save as much as $2,000 a year in energy costs by going solar.

Such savings, of course, would come at the expense of electric utilities, many of which have sought to slow or stop the growth of rooftop solar.

Utilities have said that residential solar systems primarily help affluent households that can afford to shell out tens of thousands of dollars on panels and batteries. As a result, the companies contend, middle-class and lower-income families are left bearing much of the cost of maintaining the electric grid.

The utility industry has been seeking to roll back state regulations and laws that allow homeowners to sell excess electricity from rooftop solar systems to the grid, including in California, the state that relies the most on solar panels. Sunrun, Sunnova and other solar companies are fighting to keep the policies in place. These battles could help determine if large solar installers can become profitable businesses.

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Home Solar Is Growing, but Big Installers Are Still Losing Money

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Some companies are having trouble surviving and making money installing panels because of intense competition and the high costs of doing business. Solar panels atop a home in Brooklyn. Home solar installations, measured by their power capacity, grew 17 percent last year. Credit...

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Soldiers with the South Carolina National Guard after helping on Thursday to erect a pollution control boom near a coal ash pit that threatened to flood. Credit Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

The phrase "coal ash" made headlines this week after a dam on a lake at the site of a power plant in Wilmington, N.C., was breached, allowing the hazardous ash into a river that supplies drinking water to much of the southeastern part of the state.

The plant that was shut down, owned by Duke Energy, had been a growing concern since last week after heavy rains associated with Hurricane Florence caused a coal ash landfill at the site to erode, spilling ash onto a roadway.

Coal ash is the powdery substance that remains after burning coal.

What remains after coal is burned includes fly ash, bottom ash and so-called scrubber sludge, said Lisa Evans, chief counsel to Earthjustice, an environmental law organization.

The sludge, which is created from solutions sprayed inside exhaust stacks to capture the harmful chemicals that cause acid rain, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, falls to the bottom.

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A coal ash landfill under construction near Wilmington, N.C., on Wednesday showed heavy damage from Hurricane Florence. Credit Kemp Burdette/Cape Fear River Watch, via Associated Press

The remnants of burned coal include arsenic, boron, lead and mercury, which are known carcinogens and damage organs, among other health effects.

No, according to Ms. Evans. That is the colloquial description of these basins, but it is really a misnomer given their size, she said.

"It's a hard thing to get a word for because the E.P.A. calls it a 'surface impoundment,'" she said.

The largest of them is 1,300 acres in Pennsylvania, with a more typical size around 100 acres, she said. There are about 1,000 such ponds documented in the country, though the number is likely higher because not all have been inventoried, she said.

While there is a high concentration of these basins in coal states like Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the largest concentration is in southeastern states such as Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, which are more prone to hurricanes.

Historically, these ponds have essentially been unlined pits that store "an alphabet soup of chemicals that are toxic to human health," Ms. Evans said.

Pumps were deployed to prevent the flooding of a coal ash pit in Conway, S.C. Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

Data collected by the federal Environmental Protection Agency found that 95 percent of them had leaked, seeping into rivers and groundwater supplies.

E.P.A. rules that took effect in 2015 required that the ponds be inspected for structural stability, have groundwater monitoring systems and that sites be cleaned up if contamination was found.

The rules, however, did not address power plants that had been retired, allowed unlined impoundments to operate indefinitely and regulated the ash as nonhazardous solid waste, Ms. Evans said.

The coal industry and environmental groups sued federal regulators. The industry thought the rules were too stringent and environmental groups thought they did not go far enough.

After President Trump took office, the E.P.A. entertained with "lightning speed" a petition to roll back the rules.

A federal appeals court, however, recently issued a ruling arising from the lawsuit, sending the E.P.A. "back to square one" to revisit parts of the regulations related to unlined coal ash ponds and ones at retired plants, Ms. Evans said.

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What Is Coal Ash and Why Is It Dangerous?

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The phrase "coal ash" made headlines this week after a dam on a lake at the site of a power plant in Wilmington, N.C., was breached, allowing the hazardous ash into a river that supplies drinking water to much of the southeastern part of the state.

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Big oil companies lost billions in 2020 because of the pandemic and face broad questions about how they will adapt to climate change and regulations.

A Total refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. Even with a dim view of the future, there are signs of a recovery in the oil industry. Credit... Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

HOUSTON - Big Oil isn't so big anymore.

Exxon Mobil, BP and other large oil companies collectively lost tens of billions of dollars last year, posting their worst performance in years and, for some companies, in decades.

The pandemic was largely to blame. It sapped demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel as countries and states locked down and people stayed home. But such painful years could become more commonplace as growing concerns about climate change, tighter regulations, and the rise of electric cars and trucks force a reckoning for an industry that has dominated the global economy over much of the last century. General Motors further raised the stakes for the industry last week when it said it aimed to do away with internal combustion engines and sell only electric cars by 2035.

The oil industry is slowly transitioning to a future dominated by cleaner energy. BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Total and other European companies are investing considerable resources in offshore wind and solar energy while cutting back on oil. But those investments are unlikely to pay off for years, maybe even a decade or two.

The American oil majors have been far slower to pivot from fossil fuels, but they are feeling increasing pressure from investors to change their business models. Exxon said this week that it was investing $3 billion in a new business called Low Carbon Solutions, which will initially focus on carbon capture and sequestration projects.

On Tuesday, Exxon reported that it lost $22.4 billion in 2020, compared with a profit of $14.3 billion in 2019. Much of the loss came from a $19.3 billion write-down of assets, including natural gas operations that the company acquired when energy prices were much higher.

And BP said on Tuesday that it lost $5.7 billion last year - its first loss in a decade. The company made a $10 billion profit in 2019. Now the company is cutting at least 10,000 jobs from a work force of about 70,000 people and selling some $25 billion in businesses it decided it didn't need anymore.

Conoco Phillips, the largest American independent producer, lost $2.7 billion for the year. Chevron said last week that it had lost $5.5 billion, down from a profit of $2.9 billion in 2019.

Still, oil executives tried to strike an optimistic tone when speaking about the future, arguing that their business would bounce back in 2021 as vaccine distribution accelerated and economic activity recovered from the depths of the pandemic.

"We see more opportunity down the road," Darren W. Woods, Exxon's chief executive, who normally skips the company's quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts, said on the call Tuesday. "I feel good about where we are today. As I look at the first quarter we are already ahead of where we thought we would be."

Through much of the last year, investors soured on Exxon, and Wall Street was rife with rumors that the company would slash its dividend to preserve cash. The share price had plummeted by roughly half from early last January - sinking as low as $31 in November, its lowest level in nearly 20 years.

But Exxon's share price has climbed back to about $46, principally because energy prices have recovered strongly in recent weeks. Oil prices are up by nearly 10 percent this year, and the blizzard in the Northeast is driving up natural gas prices because the fuel is used to heat homes and businesses. Exxon's dividend now appears safe. And aside from the write-downs, Exxon made a small profit in the last three months of the year.

"The industry has been to hell and back," said Michael C. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economy Research. "They've mostly survived the worst circumstances they have ever faced, and it's all but certain things will look up from here in terms of price and demand."

Goldman Sachs has predicted that oil prices could rise another $10 a barrel, to as high as $65 by July. That would be a remarkable recovery from prices that languished at less than half that for much of 2020, though it would remain far below prices of a decade or so ago, when a barrel of oil surpassed $140 and oil companies were making record profits.

The industry has suffered repeated shocks in recent years, with prices plummeting during the recession that started in December 2007, again in 2015 when OPEC flooded the market with crude to undercut American production, and last year, when the pandemic took hold.

The industry's pain forced many companies to lay off employees and cut dividends. Dozens of once high-flying businesses, like Chesapeake Energy, declared bankruptcy in recent years.

Even now, when conditions seem to be improving, the industry's prospects remain uncertain. Because of the emergence of new coronavirus variants, it is not clear how quickly the United States, Europe and other major economies will get virus spread under control. And then there are the larger questions about climate change.

BP's chief executive, Bernard Looney, has pushed his company to invest heavily in areas like offshore wind farms and hydrogen production to prepare for a world that uses less oil and gas. But he acknowledged on Tuesday that the payoff from some of these investments might not come until the 2030s and that the company would remain reliant on oil and gas for its profits for some time.

Still, Mr. Looney said in an interview on Tuesday that he welcomed President Biden's commitment to fighting climate change. The new president has signed executive orders directing the government to raise fuel economy standards and limit new oil and gas drilling on federal lands.

"That is one of the good things about being a company in transition," Mr. Looney said.

Exxon has taken a different tack. But even its chief executive appeared to acknowledge that the industry was in for more turbulence.

"We don't know where prices are going to go," Mr. Woods told analysts. "Our plan is to rebuild the balance sheet so we can be in a position going forward to absorb any shocks that come in the future."

Stanley Reed contributed reporting from London.

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After a Bruising Year, the Oil Industry Confronts a Diminished Future

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Big oil companies lost billions in 2020 because of the pandemic and face broad questions about how they will adapt to climate change and regulations. HOUSTON - Big Oil isn't so big anymore. Exxon Mobil, BP and other large oil companies collectively lost tens of billions of dollars last year, posting their worst performance in years and, for some companies, in decades.

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A broad move away from coal power was an important factor in pushing down global greenhouse gas emissions, researchers said, and could help accelerate a shift toward renewable energy.

A coal-fired power plant in Romeoville, Ill. A new study has analyzed emissions and electricity demand in the United States, Europe and India. Credit... Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

The share of energy generated from coal has dropped more sharply during the coronavirus pandemic than that of any other power source, according to a new report on Monday that looked at coal demand in some of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

The shift away from coal power had a significant impact on global emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide, the researchers said, and could lead to an acceleration of the global shift toward renewable energy.

The report, led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, analyzed emissions and electricity demand in the United States, Europe and India.

Ottmar Edenhofer, director and chief economist at the Potsdam Institute and an author of the study, said the findings were surprising because natural gas has traditionally had the highest operating costs of all power sources, so gas-fired plants are usually the first to be taken offline when demand for power falls. The sharp decline in gas prices during the pandemic, however, appears to have changed that calculation, making coal power more expensive than gas power.

Coal releases more carbon dioxide than any other form of power generation, so even the relatively small decreases in demand that caused coal plants to go offline resulted in substantial decreases in greenhouse gas emissions. Burning coal for power also pollutes the air, releasing toxins that have been linked to heart and lung problems and some neurological disorders.

In some regions studied, a 20 percent decrease in power demand from 2019 monthly averages corresponded with decreases in carbon dioxide emissions of up to 50 percent. Emissions declines in terms of coal demand were most pronounced in Germany, Spain and Britain.

The trend away from coal could outlast the pandemic, the report said. That's because power plants that use renewable energy, like wind or solar, are expensive to build. Once complete, though, it is not necessary to purchase fuels to run them.

According to a separate study by Ember Climate, an energy research organization based in London, global wind and solar power capacity increased last year despite the pandemic. That, combined with the relatively low operating costs, means that when power demand rebounds, a greater share of the total energy will quite likely come from low-emissions or renewable sources.

The authors of the Potsdam report noted, however, that so-called brown recovery plans that expand coal power are still a possibility. That is particularly a concern in parts of Southeast Asia, where energy demand is increasing quickly but high interest rates can lead to steep costs for renewable energy projects.

"We are not saying we predict that coal will be phased out," Dr. Edenhofer said. "What we are saying is, this is now a splendid opportunity, and it would be good if energy ministers and finance ministers around the globe will take advantage of the situation."

Katrin Ganswindt, who works on energy and finance campaigns for the German environmental nonprofit Urgewald, noted that market forces could push some countries to a brown energy recovery. She noted that in China, the appetite for new coal power plants is waning, leading Chinese coal corporations to pursue new coal projects in neighboring countries.

"The consideration is always, in the end, a financial one," Ms. Ganswindt said. "It's less risky to do what you know instead of changing that, because the risk of climate change still looks so unrealistic or so far away."

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Coal-Fired Power Took a Beating During the Pandemic, Study Finds

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A broad move away from coal power was an important factor in pushing down global greenhouse gas emissions, researchers said, and could help accelerate a shift toward renewable energy.

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America’s Light Bulb Revolution - The New York Times

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America’s Light Bulb Revolution - The New York Times

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Basic Light Bulbs Installed in U.S. Homes

Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding. | Source: Department of Energy

Solar panels and wind turbines get a lot of attention, but a more inconspicuous instrument is helping to reshape America's energy economy right now: The humble light bulb.

Over the past decade, traditional incandescent bulbs, those distinctive glass orbs with glowing wire centers, have been rapidly replaced by more energy-efficient lighting. The shift has driven down electricity demand in American homes, saving consumers money and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The energy savings are expected to grow as highly efficient and increasingly inexpensive LED bulbs continue to replace older lights. But energy efficiency advocates worry that the Trump administration could slow the pace of this lighting revolution.

Last month, the Department of Energy said it would withdraw an Obama-era regulation that nearly doubled the number of light bulbs subject to energy-efficiency requirements. (The chart above shows changes for basic, pear-shaped bulbs that are regulated by current rules. Other bulb styles, including globe, candelabra and reflector bulbs, as well as outdoor lighting, are not included.)

Industry groups are also pushing back on new lighting efficiency requirements slated to go into effect next year.

Energy Use Is Down in American Homes. Lighting Is a Big Part of the Story.

Residential Electricity Demand Per Household

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Census Bureau

After climbing for decades, electricity use by American households has declined over the past eight years.

"That's a staggering change," said Lucas Davis, an energy economist at the Haas School of Business, part of the University of California, Berkeley.

The economic recession in the late 2000s contributed to an initial dip in electricity demand, but as the economy improved, lighting and other energy-efficiency improvements continued to drive down household electricity use.

Congress established the first national light bulb efficiency standards in 2007, which were signed into law by President George W. Bush. Starting in 2012, the law required new light bulbs to use 28 percent less power than existing incandescent lights - essentially ending the sale of the older, inefficient bulbs.

A new generation of halogen bulbs initially replaced traditional incandescents, but, more recently, sales of highly efficient LEDs have grown as their prices have fallen.

The switch to more efficient lighting has been relatively rapid, Dr. Davis said, because of the short lifespan of traditional light bulbs. While consumers may replace an old refrigerator or dishwasher with an energy-saving model once a decade, incandescent bulbs last only about a year before they need replacing.

And that replacement yields huge relative savings.

"When you take out incandescent light bulbs and replace them with LEDs, the amount of electricity you consume goes down more than 80 percent," Dr. Davis said. "There's nothing else like that."

Source: Department of Energy
[Wirecutter, the product review site owned by The New York Times, has a guide to energy-efficient LED bulbs here.]
The Future of Lighting Efficiency

A second phase of the 2007 lighting efficiency rules is scheduled to go into effect next year, prohibiting the sale of lightbulbs that put out less than 45 lumens per watt. Currently, only compact fluorescent and LED bulbs can meet that requirement. That means all basic incandescent bulbs, including the recent generation of halogens, would be eliminated from store shelves on Jan. 1.

Industry groups have contested that standard, along with an Obama-era ruling that expanded which light bulbs it would apply to. The Department of Energy said last month that it had erred when it determined in 2017 that certain decorative and non-basic bulb styles would be subject to the 2020 standards.

Clark Silcox, a lawyer for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, a trade group that represents major lighting manufacturers like General Electric and Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), said that consumers were already switching to highly efficient LED bulbs on their own, pointing to industry data that shows LEDs outsold all other types of bulbs for the first time in 2017.

"The question now is: Does the Department of Energy accelerate that by putting on a ban," Mr. Silcox said, even if it would "disrupt retail terribly."

But Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said "there's no reason to move backward," adding that the lighting industry has had years to prepare for the next phase of efficiency rules.

"The LEDs are already on the shelf," he said. "They work great, they last longer and they use one-sixth of the power."

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Basic Light Bulbs Installed in U.S. Homes Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding. | Source: Department of Energy Solar panels and wind turbines get a lot of attention, but a more inconspicuous instrument is helping to reshape America's energy economy right now: The humble light bulb.

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How Does Your State Make Electricity? - The New York Times

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How Does Your State Make Electricity? - The New York Times

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Overall, fossil fuels still dominate electricity generation in the United States. But the shift from coal to natural gas has helped to lower carbon dioxide emissions and other pollution. Last year, coal was the main source of electricity generation for 18 states, down from 32 states in 2001.

Top Source of Electricity Generation In Every State

But experts warn that a shift to natural gas alone won't be enough to curb emissions and avoid dangerous global warming.

"Switching from coal to gas is a fine thing to do in the short run, but it's not a solution in the longer run," said Severin Borenstein, Director of the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "Gas still produces a lot of greenhouse gases. We can't stay on gas and solve this problem. Ultimately we're going to have to go to much lower or zero-carbon sources."

We charted every state's electricity generation mix between 2001 and 2017 using data from the United States Energy Information Administration. Scroll down or skip to your state:

In 2001, coal fueled more than half of the electricity produced in Alabama, but several of the state's aging coal plants have closed since then or transitioned to burning cheaper natural gas. By 2017, natural gas was the top electricity source in the state, followed by nuclear. Coal came in third place, providing just under a quarter of the state's power generation.

Alabama generates more electricity than it consumes, and typically sends about one-third of its output to nearby states.

Natural gas has been Alaska's top source of electricity generation since 2001, but hydroelectric power has increased its share during that time. The state aims to get 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025, but that goal is voluntary and has no legal weight.

Alaska has its own electric grid, which means that "whatever electricity is created there is what they're consuming," said Glenn McGrath, a power systems analyst at the Energy Information Administration. "It's about as isolated as you can get."

Many of Alaska's rural communities are not connected to the main grid at all and use diesel generators for power.

Coal was Arizona's top source of electricity generation until 2016, when natural gas produced more power. Last year, natural gas, nuclear and coal each provided a little less than a third of the electricity produced in the state.

But coal power is expected to decline further. The state's Navajo Generating Station, the largest coal-fired power plant in the West, is slated to close in 2019, largely because of competition from cheaper natural gas.

Coal was the top source of electricity produced in Arkansas every year between 2001 and 2017, but its generation share slowly decreased during that time. Natural gas, meanwhile, grew to provide more than a quarter of the electricity produced in the state last year, up from just 6 percent in 2001.

Arkansas generates more electricity than it consumes and exports power to nearby states.

Natural gas has been California's top electricity source since 2001. But half of the power produced in the state last year came from renewable sources, including solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectricity.

Last year, about a fourth of the electricity consumed in the state, including some generated by coal power, came from outside of its borders. (Imports are not pictured in the graphic above.) But California plans to stop buying electricity from coal-burning plants in Utah and other states.

The vast majority of the electricity generated in Colorado comes from fossil fuel sources: about half from coal, and a quarter from natural gas. But wind power has been on the rise over the past decade. Last year, wind was the third-largest source of electricity produced in Colorado, accounting for nearly a fifth of the state's generation.

Colorado has set a requirement that 30 percent of the electricity sold by utilities come from renewable sources by 2020.

Nuclear power and natural gas supplied the vast majority of electricity generated in Connecticut between 2001 and 2017. Natural gas power has been on the rise during that time, accounting for nearly half of the state's electricity generation last year, up from just 13 percent nearly two decades earlier. Coal-fired generation has almost entirely disappeared in the state and Connecticut's last remaining coal plant, Bridgeport Harbor, is scheduled to close in 2021.

Five percent of the electricity generated in Connecticut came from renewable sources in 2017. This year, the state expanded its renewable energy standard to require that utilities get 40 percent of the electricity they sell to consumers from renewable sources by 2030.

Natural gas displaced coal as the primary source of electricity produced in Delaware in 2010, and coal's generation share has declined dramatically since then. Coal provided 70 percent of the power produced in Delaware in 2008, its peak year, but slightly less than 5 percent by 2017. Natural gas more than quadrupled its generation share during the same period.

Thanks in part to this shift, carbon dioxide emissions from the state's electricity sector have fallen over the past decade. Delaware will require that utilities get 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025.

Power produced in the state supplies "between two-thirds and three-fourths of the electricity sold to Delaware customers," according to the E.I.A. The rest comes from neighboring states through the regional grid. (Imports are not shown in the chart above.)

In 2001, more than a third of the electricity produced in Florida came from burning coal, but natural gas surpassed coal as the state's top generation source two years later and continued to expand its share of the state's power mix. By 2017, natural gas made up two thirds of Florida's electricity generation, more than double the national average.

Florida is the second-largest producer of electricity nationwide, after Texas, but still relies on imports from neighboring states to meet consumer demand.

Despite its nickname, the Sunshine State generates very little power through solar energy and has no renewable energy requirements.

Coal provided the majority of Georgia's power generation through the 2000s but declined as natural gas power increased. In recent years, coal's generation share has dropped sharply as several aging coal-fired plants have been retired.

Utilities in the state are in the process of building two new nuclear reactors, the only new nuclear projects under construction in the country.

About a tenth of Georgia's power generation came from renewable sources last year, mostly biomass and hydroelectricity. But solar power is growing quickly in the state. Georgia doesn't impose any statewide renewable energy requirements, but the city of Atlanta is developing a plan to get all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035.

Hawaii has relied heavily on imported petroleum to make electricity for the past two decades. But the state has a bold plan to generate all of its power from local renewable sources by 2045.

Last year, renewables accounted for a fourth of the power produced in Hawaii, up from less than a tenth in 2001. Solar generation, mostly from small-scale rooftop panels, has grown rapidly in the state over the past five years.

Hydroelectric power has long dominated Idaho's generation mix. But, in recent years, its share has fallen, partly because of drought. The state still produces the majority of its electricity from renewable sources, with wind powering 15 percent of in-state generation last year, up from less than 2 percent a decade ago. Solar power, while still a small share, increased sharply between 2016 and 2017.

Idaho relies heavily on out of state imports to meet electricity demand. While coal makes up only a fraction of in-state generation, in the end "about one-third of the electricity consumed in Idaho is from coal-fired power plants located in other states," according to the E.I.A. (Import data is not shown in the chart above.)

Nuclear power is Illinois' top source of electric generation. It has provided more than half of the power produced in the state for nearly two decades. Coal is an important source of power for the state, too - even surpassing nuclear as the top generation source twice over the past decade, in 2004 and again in 2008 - but its share has declined in recent years as old power plants have been retired or converted to burn natural gas. Both natural gas and wind power have increased over the past decade.

Illinois produces "considerably more" electricity than it uses in-state, according to the E.I.A. It sends the surplus to Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states through regional grids.

Coal has generated most of the electricity made in Indiana for nearly two decades, but, in recent years, natural gas and wind power have made inroads. Natural gas accounted for 2 percent of the state's electricity generation in 2001 but grew to provide nearly 20 percent in 2017.

The Indiana Legislature established a voluntary clean energy standard in 2011 that encourages electric utilities to get an increasing amount of power from renewable and other alternative energy sources. However, no Indiana utilities participated in the program last year, according to the E.I.A.

Wind power has exploded in Iowa over the past decade. Wind provided just 1 percent of the electricity produced in the state in 2001 but climbed to nearly 40 percent by 2017. Iowa still produces nearly half its electricity from coal, but coal's generation share has declined since 2010.

In absolute terms, the state, one of the windiest in the country, was the third-largest producer of wind power last year, after Texas and Oklahoma. Iowa produces more power than it consumes, sending the surplus to nearby states.

Iowa in 1983 became the first state to pass legislation requiring utilities to get some amount of electricity from renewable resources, but the state has not updated its standards.

Like many Great Plains states, Kansas has seen significant growth in wind power over the past decade. The share of electricity generated from wind has increased fivefold since 2010.

In 2009, the Kansas Legislature passed a renewable energy standard requiring utilities to get an increasing amount of electricity from wind, solar and other renewable sources - up to 20 percent by 2020. But Gov. Sam Brownback and state legislators softened the measure in 2015, making the goal voluntary, after conservative groups with ties to the industrial conglomerate Koch Industries lobbied against the stricter standard.

Coal still powers the vast majority of the electricity produced in Kentucky, a longtime coal mining state. Last year, coal was the source of nearly 80 percent of state generation, but for most of the past two decades that number hovered closer to 90 percent.

Since 2014, a number of Kentucky's older coal plants have been shut down or converted to burn natural gas, which provided 13 percent of the state's electricity generation in 2017.

Natural gas provides the bulk of electricity generation in Louisiana, one of the top-five producers of natural gas in the country. Last year, gas accounted for 60 percent of electricity made in the state, up from 46 percent in 2001. During that time, coal-fired generation declined, dropping from its position as the second-biggest source of power in the state to third place.

Louisiana also gets some electricity from neighboring states. (Imports are not in the chart above.)

Maine "leads New England in wind power generation," according to the E.I.A. Last year, wind supplied one-fifth of the electricity produced in the state. Hydroelectric and biomass power, which comes from burning wood and other organic material, were the next-biggest sources of generation.

Since 2000, the state has required that electricity providers get 30 percent of the power they sell to customers from existing renewable resources. In 2017, utilities were expected to get 10 percent from new renewable sources. The state has separate goals for wind-energy development.

The total amount of electricity created in Maine has declined since 2010, especially from natural gas power, and the state has increasingly relied on energy imports from Canada. (Imports are not included in the chart above.)

Coal power has been on the decline in Maryland for a decade and has provided less than half of the electricity produced in the state since 2012. During that time, the share of electricity generated by nuclear power and natural gas has increased.

Maryland consumes more electricity than it generates and imports nearly half of its power from other Mid-Atlantic States through the regional grid. (Imports are not included in the chart above.)

Natural gas has more than doubled its share of electricity generation in Massachusetts over the past two decades. Coal and oil generation fell sharply during that same period, and the state's last large coal-fired power plant shut down last year. The amount of power created from solar energy has increased sharply in the state since 2013.

Massachusetts consumes more electricity than it produces in-state and gets the remainder from nearby states through the regional grid. (Imports are not shown in the chart above).

Coal remained the top source of electricity produced in Michigan last year, but its generation share declined from a little over 60 percent in 2001 to just under 40 percent in 2017. During the same period, natural gas nearly doubled its generation share. Wind, Michigan's main renewable energy source, provided nearly 5 percent of the electricity produced in the state last year.

In 2008, Michigan required utilities and other electricity providers to get at least 10 percent of the power they sell to customer from renewable sources by 2015. That goal was met and subsequently expanded to 15 percent by 2021.

Coal has been the top source of electricity generated in Minnesota for the past two decades. But coal's generation share declined between 2001 and 2017 as wind and natural gas generation grew.

The state requires utilities to gradually sell an increasing amount of electricity from renewable sources, with a requirement of 25 percent of total sales by 2025.

Natural gas powered more than three-quarters of the electricity generated in Mississippi last year. Coal, once the state's top source of electricity, has declined over the past decade, outcompeted by cheaper natural gas. Coal provided 36 percent of the electricity produced in-state in 2001, but just 8 percent in 2017.

Missouri's electricity generation mix hasn't changed much in nearly two decades. Coal provided the vast majority of power generated in the state between 2001 and 2017, declining only slightly during that time as older coal-fired plants went offline or switched to burning natural gas.

Missouri will require utilities to get at least 15 percent of the electricity they sell from renewable sources by 2021, including a small amount from solar power.

Coal has been the top source of electricity produced in Montana for nearly two decades but its generation share declined from 70 percent in 2001 to just under 50 percent last year. Hydropower, the state's second-largest source of electricity, increased its share during that time to nearly 40 percent, and wind power grew to 8 percent of in-state generation.

Montanans only use about half of the electricity produced in the state, according to the E.I.A. The state sends the rest to its Western neighbors.

Coal has been the top source of electricity produced in Nebraska for nearly two decades, but its generation share declined slightly between 2001 and 2017. Nuclear power provided 25 percent of the state's electricity generation on average during that time, but its share varied from year to year.

Wind has been increasing its share of total generation over the past decade, accounting for 15 percent of the electricity produced in the state last year. Nebraska has the potential for substantially more wind power, according to the E.I.A.

Last year, natural gas provided nearly 70 percent of electricity produced in the state, followed by solar power, which supplied 12 percent of the state's generation. Until recently, Nevada required that 25 percent of the electricity sold by utilities in the state come from renewable sources by 2025. In November, Nevadans voted to increase that requirement to 50 percent by 2030.

The bulk of electricity generated in New Hampshire comes from the Seabrook nuclear power plant, the largest reactor in New England. Natural gas has provided about a fifth of the power produced in the state since the early 2000s, when two new generating stations began operating. The share of New Hampshire's electricity generated from coal has dwindled over the past two decades, from 25 percent in 2001 to less than 2 percent in 2017.

The state is requiring utilities to get 25 percent of the electricity they sell to customers from renewable resources by 2025. The top two sources of renewable energy in the state are biomass, or energy that comes from burning wood and other organic matter, and hydroelectric power.

New Hampshire produces more power than is consumed in-state and sends about half to neighboring states through New England's regional electric grid. (Exports are not included in the chart above.)

Nuclear power was the top source of electricity generated in New Jersey until recently, when it was edged out by natural gas. Last year, natural gas accounted for nearly half of the state's power generation, and nuclear power supplied 45 percent. Solar energy contributed 4 percent of the state's electricity.

This year, New Jersey increased its renewable energy standard to require that 21 percent of the electricity sold in the state come from renewable sources by 2021, with that requirement increasing to 35 percent by 2025 and to 50 percent by 2030. In an effort to further reduce carbon emissions, the state also passed legislation to prop up its nuclear plants, which currently provide the largest portion of zero-emissions energy.

The state gets some of the power it consumes through the Mid-Atlantic regional grid. (Imports are not included in the chart above.)

Coal has been New Mexico's primary source of electricity generation for nearly two decades. But coal-fired power declined since 2004 "in response to tougher air quality regulations, cheaper natural gas, and California's decision in 2014 to stop purchasing electricity generated from coal" in neighboring states, according to the E.I.A.

Natural gas, wind and solar accounted for a little less than half of the electricity produced in New Mexico last year, up from just 15 percent two decades earlier. The state will require utilities to get 20 percent of the electricity they sell from renewable energy by 2020. New Mexico is also looking to increase generation from zero-carbon sources because it sends a significant amount power to California, a state with some of the strictest renewable energy policies in the country.

Natural gas and nuclear power have supplied the majority of electricity generated in New York for nearly two decades and their share has expanded as coal use in the state has declined. For the past decade, New York has also produced about a fifth of its electricity from hydropower, the state's largest source of renewable energy.

The state will require utilities to get 50 percent of the power they sell to consumers from renewable sources by 2030, an ambitious goal, and aims to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Wind and solar energy make up a small but growing portion of New York's electricity generation, together providing just over 4 percent of the state's electricity last year.

New York tends to consume more energy than it creates and imports some electricity from neighboring states and Canada. (Electricity imports are not included in the chart above.)

Coal provided the majority of North Carolina's electricity generation between 2001 and 2011. But nearly 30 of the state's coal-burning units shut down over the following six years and, by 2017, coal generation had dropped below nuclear and natural gas power. Natural gas generation increased after the national fracking boom of the late 2000s and became the second-largest source of electricity generation in the state in 2016.

North Carolina is currently the only Southern state with significant solar generation. The state's unique implementation of a decades-old federal mandate, the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, has encouraged the growth of utility-scale solar. North Carolina has also set a requirement that utilities get 12.5 percent of the electricity they sell to consumers from renewable energy resources by 2021.

As in many Great Plains states, wind energy has taken off in North Dakota over the past decade. Last year, wind powered more than a quarter of the electricity produced in the state, up from less than 2 percent a decade earlier.

In 2007, the North Dakota Legislature set a voluntary goal for utilities: to get 10 percent of the electricity sold to consumers from renewable or recycled energy by 2015. That goal was met and even surpassed, according to utility analysts.

North Dakota produces more electricity than is consumed in the state and about half is sent to its neighbors. (Exports are not charted above.)

Coal has been the top source of electricity produced in Ohio for nearly two decades but its generation share has been decreasing since 2011 as several of the state's coal-fired power plants have closed down. Over that same period, natural gas has increased its share in Ohio's electric generation mix.

Wind is currently the state's top source of renewable energy, though it provided only about 1 percent of the electricity generated in Ohio last year. The state wants to expand that, however. It will require utilities to get at least 12.5 percent of the electricity they sell to consumers from renewable sources by the end of 2026.

The bulk of Oklahoma's power generation for much of the past two decades has come from natural gas and coal, with the two often competing to be the state's top source of electricity. But in 2016, wind surpassed coal as the second-largest source of electricity produced in the state.

Last year, the state was second only to Texas in total electricity generation from wind.

In 2010, Oklahoma requ ired that 15 percent of its generation capacity comes from renewable sources by 2015. It also designated natural gas as its preferred choice for new fossil fuel projects. The state had exceeded the renewable target by 2012.

Most of the electricity produced in Oregon in any given year comes from hydropower but the share produced from water fluctuates with precipitation. Power from natural gas typically increases during drought years, and decreases in years with ample hydroelectricity.

Over the past decade, wind power has grown to become the third-largest source of electricity generated in the state. In an effort to encourage more non-hydroelectric renewable energy, Oregon will require its largest utilities to get 50 percent of the electricity they sell from new renewable energy sources by 2040. The program covers projects introduced or upgraded since 1995, a cutoff that would exclude older hydropower.

Coal powered the bulk of electricity produced in Pennsylvania through 2014, when it fell below nuclear for the first time. Coal's generation share in the state decreased after the late-2000s fracking boom as aging coal power plants closed because of competition from cheaper natural gas.

Last year, nuclear power was the top source of electricity generated in Pennsylvania. But natural gas is putting economic pressure on the state's nuclear generators, too, with one reactor scheduled to shut down in 2019. Pro-nuclear groups, saying the loss of this emissions-free electricity is bad news for climate change, have sought state subsidies for nuclear energy.

Pennsylvania will require that 18 percent of the electricity that utilities sell to consumers come from renewable and alternative energy by 2021, with at least 0.5 percent coming from solar power. Last year, renewable energy made up about 5 percent of in-state generation.

Pennsylvania is the country's third-biggest generator of electricity, behind Texas and Florida. The state is a big supplier of energy to the Mid-Atlantic region.

Natural gas dominates electricity generation in Rhode Island, but wind and solar energy, while still small, have grown quickly in recent years.

Rhode Island will require electricity providers to get nearly two-fifths of the power they sell to consumers from renewable sources by 2035. The state consumes more electricity than it generates and gets the rest from neighboring states. (Imports are not included in the chart above.)

A majority of the electricity generated in South Carolina comes from nuclear power, with coal and natural gas taking second and third place, respectively. Coal's generation share has declined over the past decade as power from natural gas has increased.

South Carolina produces more power than it consumes and sends the surplus to neighboring states.

Hydropower has supplied the majority of the electricity created in South Dakota for most of the past two decades, but coal generation surpassed hydroelectricity during three years: 2001, 2004 and 2008. Since then, coal's share of the state generation mix has declined, while the share coming from wind power has increased.

Last year, wind was the second-largest source of electricity produced in South Dakota, accounting for nearly a third of generation in the state.

South Dakota exports power to states across the Central and Western United States.

Coal supplied most of the electricity produced in Tennessee between 2001 and 2016, but its generation share started to decline about a decade ago as natural gas power gained share. Last year, coal-powered generation dipped below nuclear for the first time in nearly two decades.

Tennessee consumes more power than it produces and makes up the shortfall with electricity from nearby states. (Imports are not included in the chart above.)

Texas produces more electricity than any other state, and natural gas has been its top generation source since 2001, with coal in second place. But coal's generation share has declined as wind power has increased. In 2014, wind overtook nuclear power as the third-largest source of electricity produced in the state. Texas produces more power from wind in total than any other state, with Oklahoma and Iowa in second and third place.

Texas adopted a renewable energy requirement in 1999 , requiring the state to install 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2025. It has already reached that goal.

The majority of electricity produced in Utah comes from coal, but coal's share has declined over the last several years as natural gas has increased.

The state produces more energy than it consumes and sends the surplus to nearby states like California. At least one Utah power plant is switching from burning coal to natural gas to comply with California's stricter environmental regulations.

Solar power grew to become the largest renewable generation source in the state in 2016 and expanded its share again last year. Utah has set a goal for utilities to get 20 percent of the electricity they sell from renewable sources by 2025.

Most of the electricity generated in Vermont came from nuclear power until 2014, when the state's only nuclear plant, the Vermont Yankee station, closed down. Since then, nearly all of the electricity produced in the state has come from renewable sources, including hydropower, biomass, wind and solar. But, Vermont's absolute generation capacity has substantially declined.

Vermont imports most of its electricity from nearby states and Canada. Last year, the state's own generation "provided only about two-fifths of the electricity consumed in Vermont," according to E.I.A.

Vermont's ambitious renewable energy goal requires that 75 percent of electricity sold in the state come from renewable sources by 2032, including 10 percent from small, in-state sources.

Coal was the top source of electricity produced in Virginia between 2001 and 2008, when its share began to decline. Natural gas power increased in the state following the national fracking boom of the late 2000s and took over as the state's primary generation source in 2015. Nuclear generation has provided a little more than a third of Virginia's electricity, on average, over the past two decades.

Virginia consumes more electricity that it generates, so it gets additional power from nearby states through the Mid-Atlantic regional grid. The state has established a voluntary goal for utilities to get 15 percent of the electricity they sell from renewable sources by 2025.

Hydropower has supplied a majority of the electricity created in Washington every year since 2001, but its share of state generation has fluctuated with precipitation. Coal, natural gas, nuclear and wind power have alternated as the second-largest source of electricity produced in the state for most of the past two decades.

Washington produces more electricity than it consumes and exports power to Canada and other Western states. The state will require its larger utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity sales from new renewable sources by 2020.

Coal dominates West Virginia's power generation mix, supplying more than 90 percent of the electricity produced in the state every year for nearly two decades. Hydropower provided a small portion of in-state generation between 2001 and 2017. Wind and natural gas have increased their generation share in recent years, but each of those sources only accounted for about 2 percent of electricity created in the state last year.

West Virginia generates more electricity than it consumes and supplies about half of its power to other Mid-Atlantic States through the shared regional grid. (Exports are not pictured in the chart above.)

Most of the electricity produced in Wisconsin comes from coal, but natural gas generation has increased over the past three years. Wind power established a foothold in the state a decade ago and has slowly expanded its share of electricity generation, too.

Wisconsin required its utilities to get 10 percent of the electricity sold in the state from renewable sources by the end of 2015. That goal was surpassed two years ahead of schedule.

The vast majority of electricity generated in Wyoming comes from coal, but wind power has made inroads during the past decade. Last year, wind provided nearly a tenth of the electricity produced in the state.

Because of its small population, Wyoming produces much more power than it consumes and sends about 60 percent to nearby states.

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Overall, fossil fuels still dominate electricity generation in the United States. But the shift from coal to natural gas has helped to lower carbon dioxide emissions and other pollution. Last year, coal was the main source of electricity generation for 18 states, down from 32 states in 2001.

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California to rely on 100% clean electricity by 2045 under bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown

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California to rely on 100% clean electricity by 2045 under bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown

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All of California's electricity will come from clean power sources by 2045 under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday, the latest in a series of ambitious goals set by the state to combat the effects of climate change.

Brown hailed the move as another example of the state's global leadership on environmental initiatives as the Trump administration backs away from such policies. The bill's signing comes just days before Brown is set to host a global conference on climate change in San Francisco, a final effort to showcase California's actions on the environment before he ends his fourth and final term as governor in January.

"California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change," Brown said during a signing ceremony at the Capitol. "And yes, it is an existential threat. No matter what the naysayers may say, it is a real, present danger to California and to the people of the world."

Senate Bill 100 by state Sen. Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) requires the state to obtain all of its electricity from clean sources - such as solar, wind and hydropower - by 2045. The bill also requires electric utilities and other service providers to generate 60% of their power from renewable sources by 2030, up from the 50% goal previously set for that date.

Brown said the legislative action shows how seriously California is taking threats to the environment. Last month, state regulators released a report showing climate change would lead to deadlier heat waves, more consistent wildfires and higher sea levels in the coming decades than previously believed.

"California has been doing stuff that the rest of the world, most of the world, is just hoping they might get to someday," Brown said.

The bill narrowly passed the Legislature last month after nearly two years of debate over cost and feasibility concerns. Opponents argued that pushing fossil fuels out of the electricity grid within three decades wasn't possible, and efforts to do so would lead to higher electric bills across the state.

But supporters contend that the new law is essential for California to meet its other climate change goals, ensuring the state remains a worldwide leader in fighting the effects of global warming. Among those who delivered late pushes for legislators to back SB 100 were former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Vice President Al Gore.

The law will take effect in January, and California will then join Hawaii as the only two states that have pledged to eliminate fossil fuels from their electric grids by 2045.

The legislation does not include a roadmap for how the state will achieve its goal. Backers of the bill say simply setting the target will give scientists and the energy industry the certainty of knowing there will be a large market for clean power technology and encourage its development.

"SB 100 sends a clear signal to folks in laboratories, folks in board rooms to have the security of knowing that the fifth-largest economy in the world is moving toward clean energy," Assemblyman Todd Gloria (D-San Diego) said.

Brown's action Monday was seen as part of an effort to bolster the state's climate credentials in advance of the global climate summit scheduled to begin Wednesday in San Francisco. The three-day meeting is expected to draw 4,000 delegates, many of them the world's leading climate change experts.

De León said the state would continue to enact climate friendly policies no matter what the Trump administration might pursue.

"Today California sends an unmistakable message to the nation and the world," he said during the signing ceremony. "Regardless of who occupies the White House, California will always lead on climate change."

Brown also announced Monday that he was signing a new executive order directing California to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, saying that the state will remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it emits by that date.

The order requires that state regulators take into account carbon emissions from nonhuman sources, such as wildfires, when developing California's environmental guidelines. The measure also encourages regulators to push for ways to sequester greenhouse gases, such as policies to preserve and expand the state's forests, to offset carbon production from other sources.

Last week, Brown signed legislation to try to block any efforts by the Trump administration to expand oil drilling along California's coastline.

12:30 p.m.: This article was updated with quotes from Brown, De León, Gloria and more details about SB 100's implementation and Brown's executive order.
This article was originally published at 10 a.m.

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California to rely on 100% clean electricity by 2045 under bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown - Los Angeles Times

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All of California's electricity will come from clean power sources by 2045 under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday, the latest in a series of ambitious goals set by the state to combat the effects of climate change.

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Looking for a Trash Can: Nuclear waste management in the United States - Science in the News

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Looking for a Trash Can: Nuclear waste management in the United States - Science in the News

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Across the United States, nuclear waste is accumulating in poorly maintained piles. 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste requiring disposal are currently in temporary storage. The United States, however, has yet to construct a long-term storage solution for this waste, leaving the nuclear material vulnerable to extreme weather events such as hurricanes, rising sea levels, and wildfire.

Nuclear power will be an essential tool in climate change adaptation because it's capable of producing massive amounts of energy without any carbon emissions. In fact, although nuclear power is expensive to build, the scale and potential of nuclear power represents the most efficient path to eliminate carbon emissions from energy production. The drawback? Nuclear waste. Dangerous for thousands of years, nuclear waste requires long-term solutions that shield it from living things, but the public pressure to build effective storage solutions just isn't there.

What is high-level nuclear waste?

Nuclear waste is primarily a byproduct of nuclear energy generation (). Nuclear energy harnesses the intense heat released from nuclear fission, where unstable atoms (either uranium or plutonium) are split into smaller elements. This heat turns water into steam, which spins turbines to generate electric power. However, the radioactive byproducts of nuclear energy generation are incredibly damaging to living things because nuclear decay also releases smaller particles-protons, neutrons and electrons-that can tear through tissue and damage genetic material, leading to cancers and birth defects.

Because of these adverse effects, nuclear waste must be treated carefully. Low-level waste (such as tools that have been contaminated with radiation) typically emits very low levels of radiation that are typically on par with the radiation we absorb daily from the sun. High-level waste, however, including spent nuclear fuel and its byproducts, is searing hot and requires years of cooling plus thick metal shielding to prevent radioactivity release. Even after 10 years of decay, this waste could emit 100 times a fatal dose of radiation in one hour.

How can nuclear waste be stored?

Nuclear waste storage facilities need to be designed to protect the waste from theft, shield it from emitting radioactivity, prevent it from leaking into water or soil, insulate it from release by natural disaster, and hide it from future generations that may not understand its danger. The main risk of nuclear waste is water running through the sealed storage containers (dry casks) and carrying nuclear particles out of storage. With this in mind, the two primary options for storage are protected sites above ground and geological repositories underground (Figure 2).

Commercial energy generation produces the majority of nuclear waste in the U.S., which remains stored above ground near each of the 99 commercial nuclear reactors scattered around the country. Nuclear waste is stored in pools to cool for many years, and some is moved to above-ground concrete casks. However, these storage solutions are temporary at best. This form of storage requires personnel to maintain the sites of disposal, to monitor leakage, and to check the temperature and radioactivity of waste. Because nuclear waste could be repurposed for weapons, these pools and casks require a security presence to prevent theft. Above-ground casks are also vulnerable to natural disasters such as earthquakes, flooding, and hurricanes that could overwhelm the storage sites. While nuclear waste disposal sites are designed to safely store waste for several years, they haven't been built to a standard that would allow the waste to sit there for centuries without constant upkeep.

Longer-term storage might be possible underground. Within geological repositories, the choice is between storage that is retrievable by future generations (geological disposition) or a sealed site that can't be reopened (geological disposal). Decisions about which path to take need to contend with many questions: Can we confidently commit societal resources to manage this waste for the future? Can we scientifically minimize the chances of the waste escaping? Can we ensure social and political support for the project?

Geological disposal greatly diminishes many of the risks of nuclear waste, securely placing the waste underground, away from water sources, hurricanes, and humans. If located in an arid or frozen area isolated from earthquakes, a geological repository would be virtually impenetrable, and would effectively shield radioactive material. Thus, permanent geological disposal is the main goal of most countries. Many countries, with the U.S., Sweden, and Finland leading the effort, have begun the arduous process of selecting a site that meets intense scientific and logistical standards. Scientific research ensures that whichever site is selected will protect humans and isolate waste. Given the 24,000-year half-life of plutonium, scientists aim to design containment mechanisms and choose sites that will remain safe and isolated for 100,000 years.

Yucca Mountain

For the past 40 years, Yucca Mountain, in an arid desert 100 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada, was on track to become the main site for storing the U.S.'s accumulated nuclear waste (Figure 3). The area has little precipitation, so little water would seep into the mountain. The extremely dense volcanic rock of the mountain has small pores, preventing any water leakage through the rock. In addition, waste would be stored far above water sources in the mountain. These features would effectively shield the waste and prevent the release of radioactivity.

In 1987, Congress directed the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain. Funded by a tax on nuclear power companies, researchers vetted the site and designed a storage plan for the mountain. In 2002, the DOE concluded that Yucca Mountain was suitable, and in 2008 they submitted an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), an independent agency tasked with protecting safety related to nuclear energy, to begin the construction process.

Many Nevadans felt that the DOE did not solicit their input in the process and that having a nuclear waste repository so close by would be dangerous. In 2010, pressured by Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and the Obama administration, the DOE withdrew its application. In turn, Congress withdrew funding, grinding the process to a halt. Still, the resulting legislation allowed the audit review to go forward, and the NRC reported in 2015 that Yucca Mountain satisfies nearly all of the regulatory requirements.

Why is it so hard to store nuclear waste safely?

The science and policy issues of nuclear waste demonstrate the need for science-informed policy but also show the limits of dictating policy through scientific assessment alone. Nuclear waste storage is a societal challenge. There is intense opposition in almost every community near a potential waste site. From decades of secrecy, bureaucracy, and top-down decision making, Americans distrust those who control nuclear waste decisions. In the absence of community engagement, Americans don't recognize the acute need for nuclear waste storage, and perceive such storage as fallible and dangerous.

However, there is a way forward. While the U.S. fought over Yucca Mountain, Finland has quietly selected, licensed, and begun construction on a nuclear waste disposal facility. Key to Finland's success was active community involvement in site selection. Indeed, Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission to study waste disposal in the U.S. concluded that nuclear waste disposal could only be successful with active community involvement. The commission advocated starting a new process of site selection, with community engagement at all stages.

While many fear nuclear waste facilities in their communities, it is not necessarily anathema to all. Nuclear waste storage facilities would guarantee a steady stream of jobs and money for the community. For example, the WIPP site, a repository for lower-level radioactive waste from defense sources maintains much community support because the site provides jobs and actively engages the community, promoting itself as vital to national defense.

Where do we go from here?

While nuclear power constitutes around 20% of the power sources in the United States, and could be critical to climate change adaptation, six states currently prohibit nuclear plant construction until a nuclear waste storage facility is built. Waste storage is the essential piece of the puzzle.

As of May 2018, the House of Representatives voted to restart the Yucca Mountain process. The Trump administration has been sympathetic to reopening Yucca Mountain, asking for $150 million, but was ultimately denied. It's unclear whether a nuclear waste repository will be built in the near future, but it's increasingly clear how necessary and how difficult the process will be.
Madeleine Jennewein is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Virology program at Harvard University.
For more information:

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Looking for a Trash Can: Nuclear waste management in the United States - Science in the News

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by Madeleine Jennewein figures by Rebecca Senft Across the United States, nuclear waste is accumulating in poorly maintained piles. 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste requiring disposal are currently in temporary storage. The United States, however, has yet to construct a long-term storage solution for this waste, leaving the nuclear material vulnerable to extreme weather events such as hurricanes, rising sea levels, and wildfire.

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No Job for Humans: The Robot Assault on Fukushima | WIRED

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No Job for Humans: The Robot Assault on Fukushima | WIRED

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The night before the mission, Kenji Matsuzaki could not sleep. For more than a year, Matsuzaki and a team of engineers had been developing their little robot-a bread-loaf-sized, red and white machine equipped with five propellers, a transparent dome, front and rear video cameras, and an array of lights and sensors. Nicknamed Little Sunfish, it was engineered to operate underwater, in total darkness, amid intense radiation. And after three months of testing, training, and fine-tuning, it was deemed ready to fulfill its mission: to find and photograph the melted-down radioactive fuel that had gone missing inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

More than six years had passed since an earthquake and tsunami hammered northeastern Japan and reduced the Fukushima facility to radioactive ruin. In all that time, no one had been able to locate the hundreds of tons of fuel inside the three reactors that had suffered core meltdowns. The uranium fuel had overheated, turned into lava, and burned through its steel container. That much was known. What happened after that was the big question. Did all the fuel flow out of the reactors, or was some still inside? Did it pile up in a heap, spread out in a puddle, spatter on the walls? Without knowing the answers to those questions, it was nearly impossible to devise a plan to get rid of it. And getting rid of it is imperative. Every day, as much as 165 tons of groundwater seeps into the reactors, becoming contaminated with radiation. And there's always the possibility that another earthquake or some other disaster could rupture the reactors again, sending radiation spilling out into the air, sea, or both.

Human beings couldn't go into the heart of Fukushima's reactors to find the missing fuel, though-at least not without absorbing a lethal dose of radiation. The job would have to be done by robots. But no robot had ever carried out such a mission before. Many had already tried and failed. Debris tripped them up. Yard-thick concrete walls threatened to block their wireless signals. Radiation fouled up their microprocessors and camera components. And so it fell to Matsuzaki, a shy-eyed , 41-year-old senior scientist with Toshiba's nuclear technology branch, to help build a machine that wouldn't end up as another one of the robot corpses already littering the reactors.

Just getting the Sunfish and its support gear into position inside the enormous concrete building that housed one of the crippled reactors took two days. Four separate teams took turns setting up the control panel, cable drum, and other equipment the robot would need to function. Even in full protective bodysuits, each group of workers could spend only a few minutes inside the structure, working by the light of portable electric lamps amid a thicket of machinery, pipes, and catwalks. When one team absorbed its maximum permitted daily dose of radiation, it was replaced by another group. Matsuzaki himself made two forays inside to put the final touches on the Sunfish, sweating inside his face mask and bodysuit in the summer heat, his nerves jumping each time his portable monitor dinged to indicate he'd received another increment of his allowable radiation dose.

The plan was for the Sunfish to spend three days mapping the debris and searching for signs of the missing fuel. Matsuzaki would monitor its progress from a control room about 500 yards away. He would be joined by a half-dozen top officials from his employer, Toshiba, and Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the mammoth utility that owns the plant. His success-or failure-would be broadcast daily around the world.

Beyond the immediate danger, cleaning up Fukushima remains critical to repairing the image of Japan's energy industry. In the wake of the disaster, Japan shut down every one of its dozens of nuclear plants, which had provided some 27 percent of the nation's power. To cover the loss, it had to massively increase imports of expensive fossil fuels. A few nuclear plants have since been permitted to restart, following years of safety upgrades, but Fukushima cost the industry much of its public support. Polls consistently show that a majority of the public opposes nuclear power. Two of Japan's former prime ministers, including the one in office at the time of the disaster, have flipped from supporting nuclear plants to calling for their elimination.

The disaster also dealt a severe blow to the global nuclear industry, which had been gaining favor even among some environmentalists as a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels. In the aftermath of the meltdown, Germany announced it would phase out nuclear power altogether, Vietnam dropped plans to build reactors, and the whole industry was thrown on the defensive. Every proposed new reactor now has to answer the question: How do we know this won't be another Fukushima?

Small wonder that in the nights leading up to the mission, Matsuzaki was feeling the pressure. "I've been having nightmares about failing," he confessed to his boss, Akira Tsuyuki. "Me too," Tsuyuki said. Late at night on July 18, 2017, the mission start time just a few hours away, Matsuzaki lay awake, wondering whether his team's technology would be any match for Fukushima.

The earthquake on March 11, 2011, was the biggest ever recorded in Japanese history, a 9.0 monster that devastated northeastern Japan and triggered a series of tsunamis that slammed into the coast, killing nearly 16,000 people. The tsunamis also knocked out power to the Fukushima Daiichi plant, shutting down the pumps needed to keep cooling water circulating in the reactor cores. Over the next several days, as Tepco engineers worked by flashlight to regain control, the fuel in three of the plant's six reactors-Units 1, 2, and 3-melted down. Gases unleashed by the damage exploded, sending plumes of radioactive particles like iodine, cesium, and plutonium into the atmosphere. The government ordered everyone within a 12-mile radius to evacuate, with about 165,000 people eventually displaced.

Government officials originally estimated it would take about 40 years and $50 billion to clean up the plant, decontaminate the surrounding area, and compensate the disaster's victims. In December 2016, they more than tripled that estimate to $188 billion. "We have never experienced a disaster as big as Fukushima," Hiroshige Seko, the head of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, told reporters at the time, according to Bloomberg. "With our limited knowledge, it was very difficult to make the previous forecast."

The Fukushima cleanup is a project far bigger and more complex than those of even the world's worst previous nuclear catastrophes. Chernobyl was literally covered up: The Soviets simply encased the whole thing in concrete and steel. Three Mile Island was tiny by comparison. Only a single reactor melted down, and none of its fuel escaped. "Fukushima is orders of magnitude more difficult," says Lake Barrett, an American who oversaw the cleanup of Three Mile Island and who signed on as a consultant to Tepco and the Japanese government in 2013.

The Hot Zone

Following the meltdown, nearly 165,000 people had to evacuate the area surrounding the Fukushima plant to avoid radioactive exposure. Today, even after extensive cleanup efforts, 50,000 people still can't go home.

In the first chaotic weeks after the meltdown, with radiation levels far too intense for anyone to work inside the reactors, Tepco scrambled to deploy robots to assess and contain the damage. Tractor-treaded bots from iRobot, drones from Honeywell, and a prototype disaster-response mech from Tohoku University scouted the rubble-strewn facility and tried to measure the intensity of the radiation. A remote-controlled concrete pumping truck was adapted so that its extendable spout could pour water into the reactors, cooling and stabilizing the overheated chambers.

In the months and years that followed, Fukushima became both a market and a proving ground for ever-advancing robot technologies designed to operate in hazardous conditions. Remote-controlled front-end loaders, backhoes, and other heavy equipment were put to work breaking up radioactive debris and loading it onto remote-controlled dump trucks. A four-legged walking robot investigated the reactor buildings. Robots with 3-D scanners were sent in to gather imagery and map radiation levels. Swimming robots inspected pools where spent fuel rods were stored, taking pictures.

But none of these robots were capable of penetrating the innermost areas of the reactors. In August 2013, the Japanese government assembled a consortium of public utilities and private companies, including Mitsubishi, Hitachi, and Toshiba, to create robots specifically for the most challenging environments. Dubbed the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, it has developed some 20 machines that have been deployed onsite. Their ranks include a snakelike bot that crawled through a tiny accessway into Unit 1, then bent itself into a more stable U-shape to explore inside. Then there was the Scorpion, a tank-tread-driven machine with a camera mounted on an elevating "tail" that was sent into Unit 2. The Japanese government is bankrolling a $100 million, state-of-the-art R&D center near the nuclear plant where robot operators train on digital models of the reactors in a giant 3-D Holo Stage and on life-size physical mock-ups.

But even with the massive government investment, many of the new robots still couldn't hack it inside the reactors. The camera on one of them, sent to clear a path for the Scorpion, was shut down by radiation; the Scorpion itself got tripped up by fallen debris. The first version of the snakelike bot got stuck; the second did better but failed to find any melted fuel. "It's very difficult to design a robot to operate in an unknown environment," says Hajime Asama, a professor at the University of Tokyo who was one of the first roboticists the government turned to for help. "Until we send the bot in, we don't know what the conditions are. And after it's sent, we can't change it."

Kenji Matsuzaki has worked in Toshiba's nuclear technology branch for more than 10 years, and by May 2016, when he was assigned to the team developing a robot to explore inside Unit 3 of Fukushima, he was familiar with the plant's basic architecture. All six of its reactors are boiling-water reactors, a type designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s and found all over the world, including in the United States. They generate electricity by circulating water through their infernally hot cores, converting it to steam that is used to turn turbine generators. Each reactor has three containers set one inside another like Russian nesting dolls. The smallest container, a steel capsule about the length of a tennis court, is called the reactor pressure vessel. That's where the nuclear fission reaction takes place, powered by fuel composed of uranium dioxide baked into ceramic pellets. This capsule is enclosed inside a primary containment vessel, a concrete and steel structure shaped like a massive light bulb, designed to capture any radiation that might accidentally escape. The containment vessel in turn is housed inside the reactor building, a concrete and metal rectangle that offers only minimal protection from radiation.

Technicians in protective gear can work for short periods inside the reactor building, but they can't enter the far more radioactive containment vessel, which is where they were likely to find at least some of the missing fuel. Building a robot that could get inside and maneuver around the containment vessel presented several unique challenges. First, the containment vessel was only practically accessible through a 5.5-inch circular maintenance opening about 8 feet above the floor of the reactor building, so the robot would have to be small. Second, because the containment vessel had been pumped full of water to cool it down, the robot would have to be able to swim. Third, since the water and thick walls would defeat wireless signals, this small, swimming robot would need to be powerful enough to move underwater while dragging as much as 65 yards of electric cable behind it.

It took months of research, experimentation, and testing in Toshiba's labs and in an enormous simulation tank at the government-run Port and Airport Research Institute to balance all these capabilities inside the little machine. Matsuzaki's team had to try different configurations of propellers, cameras, and sensors, boost the power of the propeller motors, develop a new type of coating to make the cable move more smoothly, and ensure the whole package could withstand a blistering level of radiation.

At midnight on July 19, the day the Sunfish was scheduled to make its first foray into the reactor, Matsuzaki's alarm went off in his hotel room. He and his team were staying in Iwaki, the closest habitable city with a hotel, about an hour south of the plant. Starting their day in the dark of night was the only way to have enough time to drive to the plant, suit up in protective gear, and hold a last round of meetings before their start time. That would give them about eight hours; by noon it would be too hot inside the reactor building for the technicians monitoring the robot to do their jobs.

At about 4:30 am, a group of Toshiba techs in full protective gear darted into the reactor building. They fast-walked to the outer wall of the containment vessel and climbed a step ladder up to the opening where the Sunfish and its equipment had been pre-positioned. They unsealed the valve over the opening, then pushed in a heavy guiding pipe, with the Sunfish at its tip, all the way through to the other side. Slowly and carefully, they angled the pipe until the bot slid into the water below.

Inside, it was completely dark. On their monitors in the control room, Matsuzaki's team, connected to the Sunfish's controls via the electric cable, could see only a narrow swath cut through the turbid water by the Sunfish's lights. Seated at a long table, one technician "drove" the Sunfish with a videogame-type controller. Another reeled its cable in and out, keeping it taut so it wouldn't get tangled as the bot swam this way and that. A third did his best to estimate the machine's position using a 3-D software model of the containment vessel. Matsuzaki oversaw them all, trying to forget about the platoon of corporate officials watching over his shoulder.

The first day, the Sunfish spent most of its time reconnoitering. The damage inside the containment vessel was worse than expected. Unidentifiable clumps of pebble-sized debris and pieces of half-destroyed equipment littered the floor. But there was no sign of the fuel, and after eight hours of searching, the team pulled the Sunfish back to the surface. They gave it a rest the next day while they discussed their findings and strategized their next steps.

The following morning, they sent the Sunfish back into the water. The team drove it slowly and carefully, but time after time, the bot's powerful propellers would stir up a blinding cloud of sediment, forcing them to wait until the water cleared again. After several hours of maneuvering, and with the noon deadline looming, Matsuzaki was growing nervous. Then, something startling appeared on the monitors.

"What is that?" said Matsuzaki.

Everyone began talking at once and pointing to what they saw on the screens: murky glimpses of what appeared to be stalactites of something dripping like candle wax from the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel. They'd found the first signs of the missing fuel.

They maneuvered the Sunfish around the area, documenting as much as possible, before pulling the bot out. When Matsuzaki declared the mission complete, the control room burst into applause.

By now, much of Fukushima Daiichi itself, an expansive complex covering some 860 acres, is a lot safer than you'd expect. Most areas have been decontaminated to the point where full bodysuits are no longer required. The 5,000-plus workers tasked with cleaning the place up have cut down hundreds of the cherry trees that used to enliven the grounds, torn up and paved over once-grassy open areas, and scrubbed down buildings. They have covered the seafloor just off the coast with clay to seal in cesium that seeped into the mud after the disaster. Using an enormous, purpose-built fuel-handling machine, they have removed the hundreds of spent uranium fuel rods from Unit 4, a reactor that was damaged by an explosion but did not melt down.

Still, when I visited the site last December with Lake Barrett, Tepco's American consultant, we had to put on gloves, safety glasses, surgical masks, three pairs of socks, and plastic booties over our shoes, as well as a personal radiation detector, before being allowed inside the facility.

At 72, Barrett is tall, fit, and astonishingly energetic. I first met him at the Narita airport outside Tokyo, where he bounced right off a 20-hour trip from his home in Florida, joined me in a car without stopping for so much as a cup of coffee, and talked cheerily for the entire two-hour drive to Fukushima prefecture.

When Barrett heard the first news reports about the disaster, he "didn't think much of it," he says. "There's always so much hype around these things." Then he saw the picture of Unit 1 exploding. "I said, 'Holy shit. I know exactly what that was.' I knew they were in deep doo-doo." When the call came to help out, he didn't hesitate. "It's personal for me," he says. "Japan was the only country that helped us at Three Mile Island. We owe Japan."

From atop a small hill, once covered with grass and now encased in concrete, Barrett and I survey the trio of hulking buildings outlined against the blues of the winter sky and the Pacific Ocean behind them. Remotely operated orange-and-white cranes lean over them like reverent metal giraffes. These are the reactor buildings: the intractable core of the disaster zone, the radioactive redoubts the robots must penetrate.

Each poses a unique challenge. The amount and type of damage inflicted on each is different, as is the depth of the water flooding their bases. Of course, at the heart of each is a mess of melted fuel, presumed to have flowed in different ways to different places.

Less than half a mile from these three reactors sits Unit 5, one of the three other reactors that had been shut down for regular maintenance when the tsunami hit. Since it escaped largely unscathed and is nearly identical to the damaged reactors, Tepco engineers use it to plan robot missions. Inside is a baffling maze of machines, ducts, cables, and catwalks. "You can see how hard it is to run the robots around in here," Barrett says.

We navigate our way through the building to the containment vessel. "That's just like where the Sunfish went in," he says, pointing up to an unassuming circular opening in the wall of the vessel.

We enter the containment vessel and make our way through a narrow doorway into a chamber below the reactor pressure vessel. Control rod assemblies stud the reactor vessel's underside; we have to crouch to avoid bumping our heads on them. Pointing out key areas and components, Barrett walks me through the current theories on what happened to the fuel in each of the meltdown units. "No one knows if the lava made a nice neat vertical pile or whether it flowed sideways," he says. "Hot molten fuel could have fallen into the water and caused a steam explosion that would have blown it everywhere."

In Unit 3, at least, thanks to the Sunfish, Tepco is relatively certain about a few things. The pictures it took show that the control-rod mechanisms at the bottom of the reactor vessel disintegrated. Molten fuel mixed with melted metal dripped down through the openings they left behind, presumably creating the stalactites seen in the videos. The lava-like mixture burned through both the steel grate beneath the reactor pressure vessel and a refrigerator-sized machine used to insert the control rods, and some of it dripped down to the floor of the containment vessel. There also appear to be chunks of fuel on the vessel's walls.

Inside Unit 3

Each reactor is made up of three containers, one set inside another, that hold critical equipment.

That still leaves an awful lot unknown. At the end of the day, "how much did we learn from the Sunfish mission?" Barrett asks. "It was a step, not a leap. We're getting closer and closer, but we have a long, long way to go." Tepco is continuing its efforts to scout the inside of the reactors. In January, a robotic probe using a remote-controlled camera mounted on a long pole spotted for the first time what appears to be melted fuel inside Unit 2. There may be another Sunfish mission, though it won't be the same robot that found the fuel in Unit 3. Despite emerging from the reactor undamaged, it had still absorbed a dangerous amount of radioactivity. Tepco engineers sealed it in a steel cask and interred it with other radioactive waste on the plant site.

Limited and uncertain as the Sunfish's findings are, they have helped move the ball forward. Engineers have now begun thinking about how to build the next generation of robots that will have to carry out the most complicated undertaking of all: removing the melted fuel.

Their first challenge will be enabling the bots to reach their target. "These are cramped spaces filled with huge pieces of equipment that weigh many tons. You have to cut them up in pieces and pull them out," Barrett says. One idea currently in favor is to build a massive 20-foot robot arm that would enter the reactor building on rails, reach into the reactor pressure vessel, and scoop up the fuel. Another is to send in a bot the size of a small refrigerator on tractor treads, equipped with cutting and gripping tools to wrangle debris. A second robot would lift the detritus into containers, seal it, and put it on a conveyor belt to the outside.

Either system will take years to develop. Either or both might fail. Tepco has pegged 2021 as the target year to begin removing fuel debris. How long might the entire Fukushima cleanup take? "Good question. Nobody knows. No one in human history has experience with this," says Naoaki Okuzumi, a senior manager with the decommissioning institute. "The government says 30 to 40 years. I think that is optimistic."

While the robots' work inside Fukushima Daiichi drags on, human beings who once lived near the plant are waiting to go home. The national government has decontaminated several towns and urged residents to return. At the time of my visit in December, though, roughly 130 square miles of land was still off-limits, including the better part of a town called Okuma, perched in the hills a few miles from the plant.

Yoshihiro Takada, a former resident who now works with the local government agency in charge of rebuilding, agreed to show me around. Takada spent almost his entire life in Okuma and had to escape with his wife, child, and parents when the disaster hit. They've relocated to another town 65 miles away.

I met up with Takada in a parking lot just outside the exclusion zone, where we put on full-body Tyvek suits, face masks, gloves, socks, and booties over our shoes to protect us from the particles of cesium and strontium. Inhaling even a dust speck of one of those isotopes can be dangerous. That's part of what makes radiation so terrifying: You can't feel it, see it, or smell it. It can kill you without you ever knowing you encountered it.

There was no one in the train station, the barbershop, the restaurants, or the stores. The modest houses and apartment buildings on the residential streets were all empty. The only sound I heard as we walked down the middle of the deserted main street was the chirping of clueless birds who didn't realize they'd chosen to nest in a radioactive hot zone.

"I remember this place-their pizza was so good," Takada says, gesturing at a shuttered restaurant as we walk through town. Several shop windows have been smashed by wild boar that have come down from the hills to ransack the deserted town for food. Cars sit in driveways half-hidden by overgrown weeds. Takada only occasionally checks in on his own house. "Rats are running all over it inside. There are droppings and garbage all over," he says.

The area around Fukushima is mostly scenic farmland fringed with thickly wooded hills. But drive along practically any road and you pass fields filled with rows and rows of boulder-sized, black polypropylene bags. They are filled with contaminated earth; as part of the cleanup, a layer of topsoil is being scraped up from gardens, schoolyards, and fields all across the region. Roughly 20 million of the bags are scattered around the prefecture. Many of them will eventually be moved to the outskirts of Fukushima Daiichi itself for indefinite storage, along with an ever-growing array of tanks holding the radioactive water Tepco continues to pump out of the reactors.

Ultimately, there is no technology that can simply fix what happened at Fukushima. The only certainty is that it will be a slow, incremental, frustrating process that may not even be completed in Kenji Matsuzaki's lifetime. For now, all the scientists, engineers, and their allies can do is keep the radioactivity under control, track down its source, and try to capture it. But first, they need to create the robots to do it.

Vince Beiser (@vincelb) is the author of The World in a Grain, to be published in August.
This article appears in the May issue. Subscribe now. Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app.
The Little Robots The Could

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No Job for Humans: The Robot Assault on Fukushima

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The night before the mission, Kenji Matsuzaki could not sleep. For more than a year, Matsuzaki and a team of engineers had been developing their little robot-a bread-loaf-sized, red and white machine equipped with five propellers, a transparent dome, front and rear video cameras, and an array of lights and sensors.

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U.S electricity generation by source: Natural gas vs coal - Washington Post

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U.S electricity generation by source: Natural gas vs coal - Washington Post

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Plant capacity by power source

50

500

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Other

Plant capacity by power source

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Ark.

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Plant capacity by power source

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2016

Local electric utilities take advantage of nearby resources - rivers in the Northwest, wind in the Midwest, coal in the Appalachian region, natural gas in the North - to generate the bulk of the nation's electricity. This shows the source of electricity generation in each state according to preliminary 2016 data.

Tap to rearrange

Click to rearrange
Natural gas Coal Nuclear Hydro Wind Solar Oil Other
Natural gas-powered electric plants

There are 1,793 natural gas-powered electricity plants in the United States. They generated 34 percent of the nation's electricity last year.

Advances and expansion of fracking in the past decade have unlocked vast supplies of natural gas from shale deposits all over the country. The fuel is the primary source of electricity generation in 19 states and provides at least 50 percent of the electricity in nine states.

Coal

There are 400 coal-powered electric plants in the United States. They generated 30 percent of the nation's electricity last year.

Coal was the chief source of electrical generation in 19 states and the second most common source in another nine. Coal is most popular in the East, south of New York. Coal still accounted for at least 50 percent of generation in 13 states.

Nuclear

There are 61 nuclear electric plants in the United States. They generated 20 percent of the nation's electricity last year.

New nuclear plants are coming online following decades of pause after an initial push in the 1970s and 1980s driven by the first oil shock. Maryland joined South Carolina, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Hampshire in getting a plurality of its power from nuclear last year. Twenty states have no nuclear electricity generation at all.

Hydro

There are 1,444 hydroelectric plants in the United States. They generated 7 percent of the nation's electricity last year.

It's a feast-or-famine source. Washington, Oregon, Vermont and Idaho lead the nation in power from hydroelectric plants, getting between 56 percent and 68 percent of their electricity from them. But Montana and South Dakota were the only other states where they were responsible for more than 5 percent of electricity. Government-run plants generate most of the power.

Wind

There are 999 wind-powered electric plants in the United States. They generated 6 percent of the nation's electricity last year.

Wind is the fastest-growing power source, finding a home in the Great Plains, where wind blows reliably across wide open spaces. Iowa got more than one-third of its power from wind, followed by Kansas, Oklahoma and South Dakota, which each got more than a quarter of their electricity from windmills. Wind is not the leading source of electric power anywhere but ranks second in seven states.

Solar

There are 1,721 solar-powered electric plants in the United States. They generated 1 percent of the nation's electricity last year.

Solar power is predominantly used in the Southwest, where the sun shines the most. The growth of solar has created plants in all but eight states. California gets almost 10 percent of its electricity from solar, and Nevada gets more than 6 percent. Vermont and Arizona follow with 4 percent each.

Oil

There are 1,076 oil-powered electric plants in the United States. They generated just over half of 1 percent of the nation's electricity last year.

Petroleum is no longer a popular source for electricity generation. After the rise of OPEC and the oil shocks and price increases of the 1970s, utilities switched to other fuels, mostly coal. Hawaii gets two-thirds of its electricity from oil, the only state where it is the leading energy source.

About this story

Energy Information Administration "Operable electric generating plants in the United States by energy source" at https://www.eia.gov/maps/map_data/PowerPlants_US_EIA.zip

Detailed output from EIA via EIA-860, Annual Electric Generator Report, EIA-860M, Monthly Update to the Annual Electric Generator Report and EIA-923, Power Plant Operations Report at http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/

Other energy sources include petroleum coke, other gasses, biomass and geothermal.

Originally published July 31, 2015.

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Mapping how the United States generates its electricity

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Plant capacity by power source 50 500 2000 5000MW Natural Gas Coal Nuclear Hydroelectric Oil Wind Solar Other Plant capacity by power source Oil Coal Natural Gas Nuclear Hydroelectric Wind Solar Other 50 500 2000 5000MW Wash. Mont. Maine N.D. Ore. Minn. Vt. N.H. Wis. S.D. Mass. Idaho N.Y. R.I.

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Wut?

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There's a colorless, odorless, and largely benign gas that humanity just can't get enough of. We produce 40 trillion kg of carbon dioxide each year, and we're on track to cross a crucial emissions threshold that will cause global temperature rise to pass the dangerous 2°C limit set by the Paris climate agreement.

But, in hushed tones, climate scientists are already talking about a technology that could pull us back from the brink. It's called direct-air capture, and it consists of machines that work like a tree does, sucking carbon dioxide (CO ₂) out from the air, but on steroids-capturing thousands of times more carbon in the same amount of time, and, hopefully, ensuring we don't suffer climate catastrophe.

There are at least two reasons that, to date, conversations about direct air capture have been muted. First, climate scientists have hoped global carbon emissions would come under control, and we wouldn't need direct air capture. But most experts believe that ship has sailed. That brings up the second issue: to date, all estimates suggest direct air capture would be exorbitantly expensive to deploy.

For the past decade, a group of entrepreneurs-partly funded by billionaires like Bill Gates of Microsoft, Edgar Bronfman Jr. of Warner Music, and the late Gary Comer of Land's End-have been working to prove those estimates wrong. Three companies-Switzerland's Climeworks, Canada's Carbon Engineering, and the US's Global Thermostat-are building machines that, at reasonable costs, can capture CO ₂ directly from the air. (A fourth company, Kilimanjaro Energy, closed shop due to a lack of funding.)

Over the past year, I've been tracking the broader field of carbon capture and storage, which aims to capture emissions from sources such as power plants and chemical factories. Experts in the field look at these direct-air-capture entrepreneurs as the rebellious kids in the class. Instead of going after the low-hanging fruit, one expert told me, these companies are taking moonshots-and setting themselves up for failure.

Climeworks just proved the cynics wrong. On Oct. 11, at a geothermal power plant in Iceland, the startup inaugurated the first system that does direct air capture and verifiably achieves negative carbon emissions. Although it's still at pilot scale-capturing only 50 metric tons CO ₂ from the air each year, about the same emitted by a single US household or 10 Indian households-it's the first system to convert the emissions into stone, thus ensuring they don't escape back into the atmosphere for the next millions of years.

Defying physics?

The impossibility of direct air capture can be illustrated by simple physics. Imagine if you were allowed to eat as many M&M's as you wanted-as long as you only eat red ones. If in a bag of M&M's there was one red M&M for every 10 pieces of candy, it would be easy to find them and eat them with glee. But imagine if the concentration fell to one in every 2,500. You might give up searching for even a single M&M.

At a coal-power plant, the exhaust flue gas contains about 10% carbon dioxide (i.e., about one in 10 gas molecules are CO ₂). Capturing the greenhouse gas at these relatively high concentrations requires less energy than capturing it from the air, where it is present at just 0.04% concentration (about one in 2,500 gas molecules). A 2011 report from the American Physical Society estimated that it may cost between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton of CO ₂ captured from the air. Capturing it at the source-at a coal-burning plant, for example-could cost less than one-tenth of that.

But air capture still matters. First, we currently don't have any possible way to deal with CO ₂ released by cars, ships, and planes. Second, because we are on track to emit more CO ₂ than we need to keep under the 2°C limit, we likely need a means of sucking back up some of that extra greenhouse gas.

Consider the chart below. It shows our historical emissions and then projects emission targets required to hit climate goals. Sadly, however, "approximate emission pledges" made under the Paris climate agreement show our emissions increasing, when they should be decreasing (following the trajectory shown in red on the chart).

Most systems to capture CO ₂ depend on a process called "reversible absorption." The idea is to run a mixture of gases (air being the prime example) over a material that selectively absorbs CO ₂. Then, in a separate process, that material is manipulated to pull the CO ₂ out of it. The separated CO ₂ can then be compressed and injected underground. Typically there's a limited supply of the absorbing material, so it will get put through the cycle once again to capture more of the greenhouse gas.

Climeworks and Global Thermostat have piloted systems in which they coat plastics and ceramics, respectively, with an amine, a type of chemical that can absorb CO ₂. Carbon Engineering uses a liquid system, with calcium oxide and water. The companies say it's too early in the development of these technologies to predict what costs will be at scale. "It's like if you asked someone in 1960 what the cost of commercial rockets would be today," says David Keith of Carbon Engineering. What they are willing to share are cost targets.

Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks's director, says it hopes to bring costs down to about $100 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. That's close to the price Carbon Engineering is targeting, according to Geoffrey Holmes, the company's business development manager. Peter Eisenberger, co-founder of Global Thermostat, says their technology will be even cheaper: when scaled up, he says, costs will drop to as low as $50 per metric ton. (Intriguingly, the startup's projected capture cost seems to be inversely proportional to the money each says it has raised: about $15 million in private investment for Climeworks and Carbon Engineering, and $50 million for Global Thermostat.)

Each of the startups has built a functional pilot plant to prove their technology, with the ability to capture hundreds of kg of CO ₂. And all boast that their tech is modular, meaning they can build a direct air capture plant as small or large as somebody is ready to pay for. Even at $50 per metric ton of capturing emissions, if we have to capture as much as 10 billion metric tons by 2050, we are looking at spending $500 billion each year capturing carbon dioxide from the air. It seems outrageous, but it may not be if climate change's other damages are put in perspective-and that's what these startups are betting on.

Global Thermostat's pilot plant in Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto was sitting idle when I visited it. Carbon Engineering is waiting to build out the technology more-including the ability to convert captured CO ₂ into fuels-before it starts scaling up its business. Only Climeworks has been able to show success in commercial applications.

In May this year, Climeworks set up its first commercial unit near Zurich, Switzerland, capturing about 1,000 metric tons of CO ₂ from the air each year (equivalent to 20 US households' annual emissions). The captured CO ₂ is supplied to a nearby greenhouse, where a high concentration of the gas boosts crop yield by 20%.

But the company's newest installation in Iceland is even more impressive, because it's the first true "negative emissions" plant.

Buried once and for all

To build it, Climeworks first needed a "carbon-neutral" power plant. They found one in Hellisheidi, Iceland, where the public utility company Reykjavik Energy runs a geothermal power plant. The Hellisheidi plant, about 15 miles (25 km) southeast from the capital Reykjavik, uses naturally occurring heat from a volcanically active region to produce electricity and heat, by pumping water through an underground network of pipes. As the water travels underground, it heats up and turns into steam which can be used to run turbines. The plant produces about 300 MW of electricity (enough to power 200,000 American households) and about 130 MW of heat.

Though geothermal is a clean energy source, the process of recovering heat releases gases-a mixture of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen. It's not a massive amount of CO ₂ -for each unit of energy produced, a geothermal plant produces 3% of the carbon emissions of a coal-fired power plant-but it's still something.

In 2014, Reykjavik Energy along with the help of academics in the US, Europe, and Iceland, formed a project called CarbFix to test technology to get rid of the small amount of gases it does produce. And since the Paris climate agreeement, the utility company has been ramping up its emissions-reduction efforts to help Iceland reach its country-wide goals.

Instead of using reversible absorption, CarbFix uses Iceland's plentiful natural resources to capture carbon dioxide. Every time you open a can of soda, you are drinking dissolved CO ₂ in water. The Hellisheidi plant works on a similar principle. When the gases released from geothermal vents are mixed with water, they get absorbed ever so slightly. The mixture-27 kg of fresh water for each kg of CO ₂ -is then injected 700 meters underground.

In a 2016 study, scientists found that the carbon dioxide in these water mixtures was reacting with Iceland's vast basaltic rock-dark igneous rock usually found under ocean floors-to form minerals. This process usually takes hundreds or thousands of years, but what was surprising in Iceland was that the mineralization occurred in less than two years. The speed probably has something to do with the unique local geology. Sandstone aquifers-which have been the most well-studied type of rock system when it comes to carbon dioxide-injection systems-react very slowly with CO ₂. Basalt rock, on the other hand, seems to react much more quickly, likely because of the presence of metals like iron and aluminum.

The study showed, for the first time, that storing carbon dioxide underground is easier and safer than it has been made out to be. Once locked into the minerals, the carbon dioxide cannot enter the atmosphere for millions of years. Better still, this sort of basalt rock is present in large deposits around the world-enough to take in many decades of fossil-fuel emissions, direct air capture, and more.

Over the past three years, more than 18,000 metric tons of CO ₂ have been injected into the ground as part of the project, according to Edda Aradóttir, a CarbFix geologist. Moreover, they've been able to do it for less than $30 per metric ton of CO ₂.

World-saving technology

This month, Climeworks installed a unit that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air and transfers it to CarbFix to inject underground. Because CarbFix has been monitoring the injection sites for the last three years, they can be sure there will be no leakage. And once mineralized, the CO ₂ will remain trapped for thousands or millions of years. This makes the Climeworks-CarbFix system the world's first verified "negative emissions" plant.

(A chemical plant in Chicago, where Archer Daniels Midland ferments corn to produce ethanol, claims to be a negative-emissions plant. The company says that because corn consumes CO ₂ to grow in the first place, even though fermentation releases CO ₂, it is carbon neutral-simply returning what it took from nature. If you then capture and inject those emissions underground, you could technically consider it negative emissions. But experts haven't yet run the numbers to verify Archer Daniels Midland's claim.)

Climeworks says it is now looking to customers who want to buy their way into programs that cut their emissions. The delivery company DHL, for example, has committed to reaching zero emissions by 2050. But even if they move their entire road vehicle fleet to run on all electric cars, there is currently no technology to cut emissions from the airplanes DHL relies on. The hope is that DHL will pay money to Climeworks to bury those excess emissions into the ground.

Academics used to think that direct air capture would be too expensive for any practical purposes. They still tend to think that for carbon capture and storage more broadly. But what Climeworks and its competitors are showing is that, if direct air capture can be made cheap enough for there to be commercial interest, then the economics of carbon capture at point-sources will likely work, too. And if nothing else, the existence of direct air capture gives humanity a high-premium insurance policy against what would surely be a much more expensive disaster.
Read next: The revolutionary technology pushing Sweden toward the seemingly impossible goal of zero emissions The reporting was supported by a fellowship from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.

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The world's first "negative emissions" plant has begun operation-turning carbon dioxide into stone

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There's a colorless, odorless, and largely benign gas that humanity just can't get enough of. We produce 40 trillion kg of carbon dioxide each year, and we're on track to cross a crucial emissions threshold that will cause global temperature rise to pass the dangerous 2°C limit set by the Paris climate agreement.

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...and will never return.

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US fossil fuel consumption from coal, oil, and natural gas peaked ten years ago in 2007 at 85.927 quadrillion btu, and is unlikely to ever return. There are a number of trends underneath that peak that are worth mentioning. Briefly, coal has been in superdecline; oil consumption is back to levels last seen in the late 1990's; and natural gas, bucking the trend, has made an enormous consumption advance. And then of course, there is the revolution taking place in wind and solar. Last year, 2016, total fossil fuel consumption came in at 78.569 quadrillion btu, despite, over the past decade, a US population advance of 25 million people. As most analysts now understand, the US will easily meet its Paris goals regardless of policy because economics have now taken over. US emissions have entered long term decline. Indeed, if you think US fossil fuel consumption hasn't peaked, and is going to start rising again to make new all time highs, you'd be obligated to explain why. Or better, how.

Let's run through the underlying trends in the three main fossil fuels, and then take a final look at the most updated trends in wind and solar power.

Coal. A terrible thing happened to coal over the past decade. First, natural gas undercut coal in price. Then, wind and solar started to undercut coal in price. Finally, it just so happened that these changing economics took place right as a large tranche of the US coal fleet came into the end of its lifecycle. Had much of the US coal fleet come to retirement, say, in the 1990's, the country would be saddled with a much younger, harder-to-dislodge fleet. Accordingly, US coal consumption-which is upticking a little bit from low levels this year-is in superdecline. Unfortunately for coal, there is no way to claw back its lost competitiveness in a world where wind and solar power are becoming the cheapest forms of new electricity. So if you are going to make a case that future US fossil fuel consumption will recover to a new peak, you won't get help from coal.

Oil. Why did US consumption of oil stop growing? And when did it stop growing? As suggested previously on the blog, US oil consumption can be broken into roughly two distinct eras. The first was the adoption era in which the economy, population, and oil-based industry grew uninterrupted until the late 1970's. Since then, US oil consumption has not grown, but rather, oscillated. This should be more accurately called the dependency era. As such, the last 30-40 years have been a time of complacency and risk for the global oil industry because the US has been, for all that time, a dependable market for oil but not a growth market for oil. That technology has finally found a way to start eating at the margins of this dependency presents a very dangerous moment for oil producers. There is risk that as the acceleration of EV adoption really takes off, that US oil consumption could enter decline as early as 2020. Many will disagree. But of those who disagree: would you be willing to explain how US oil consumption will break out of its dependency phase, and enter a new growth phase, something it's failed to do for decades?

Natural Gas. How did we eat away at so much coal consumption, while shifting more of the economy over to the platform of electricity? Here's how: natural gas. The US is producing more NG, exporting more NG, and using more of its own NG. Natural gas production in Pennsylvania is up more than 10X. In North America, there is so much economically recoverable natural gas it's frankly scary. Importantly, the US is installing a brand new fleet of natural gas fired power generation and in contrast to the end-of-life coal fleet, this fleet is young. The future looks great for natural gas growth: with the exception of one problem...discussed below.

Wind+Solar. Not only will US consumption of all fossil fuels fail to advance to new heights on the back of natural gas alone, but, natural gas itself will soon succumb to wind and solar power. Combined wind and solar will eat away, and then destroy the market share growth of natural gas, in the same way natural gas forced coal into zero growth, and then decline. As of 2016, combined Wind+Solar had already reached 6.9% of the total electricity market. By next year, combined Wind+Solar will cross a 10% share for the first time. And by 2020, that share will reach 14%. You can also spot one, notable phenomenon in the chart below: the total system demand for electricity is flatlining. Ergo, one energy source's gain is another energy source's loss.

Will electricity consumption continue to flatline? As you look at the chart of total electricity generation once more, consider the following: increasingly, US electricity output will follow the course of transportation demand as EV for both personal, industrial, and municipal use are deployed. Perhaps electricity generation will rise again-in fact, it probably will, starting next decade. As EV take market share from oil, however, wind and solar will increasingly supply the marginal growth of energy demand from EV. Perhaps someone would like to make the case that transportation demand crossing over to the electrical grid will be so swift, that the US will once again, at least briefly, have to call on fossil fuel resources. Maybe that happens for a short time. But how much lower will total US consumption of fossil fuels be at that time? The building blocks to a US energy system in which wind and solar are increasingly meeting marginal demand growth are easy to put together. The building blocks to a sustained recovery in total fossil fuel consumption are, by contrast, hard to find.
-Gregor Macdonald
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US Fossil Fuel Consumption Has Peaked, and Will Never Return

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US fossil fuel consumption from coal, oil, and natural gas peaked ten years ago in 2007 at 85.927 quadrillion btu, and is unlikely to ever return. There are a number of trends underneath that peak that are worth mentioning.

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Tesla starts selling solar roof; says savings to cover costs - The Washington Post

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Tesla starts selling solar roof; says savings to cover costs - The Washington Post

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DETROIT - Electric car maker Tesla has added another product to its lineup: Solar roof tiles.

As of Wednesday, customers worldwide could order a solar roof on Tesla's web site. Installations will begin next month in the U.S., starting with California. Installations outside the U.S. will begin next year, the company said.

The glass tiles were unveiled by Tesla last fall just before the company merged with solar panel maker SolarCity Corp. They're designed to look like a traditional roof, with options that replicate slate or terracotta tiles. The solar tiles contain photovoltaic cells that are invisible from the street.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said one of the drawbacks to home solar installations has been the solar panels themselves: They're often awkward, shiny and ugly. Buyers will want Tesla's roof, he said, because it looks as good or better than a normal roof.

"When you have this installed on your house, you'll have the best roof in the neighborhood. The aesthetics are that good," Musk said in a conference call with media.

The roof is guaranteed for the life of the home, which is longer than the 20-year lifespan for a typical, non-solar roof, Musk said. It has gone through the same hail, fire and wind testing that normal roofs endure.

Tesla's web site includes a calculator where potential buyers can estimate the cost of a solar roof based on the size of their home, the amount of sunlight their neighborhood receives and federal tax credits. They can also put down a refundable $1,000 deposit to reserve a place in line.

Tesla said the solar tiles cost $42 per square foot to install, making them far more costly than slate, which costs around $17 per square foot, or asphalt, which costs around $5. But homes would only need between 30 and 40 percent of their roof tiles to be solar; the rest would be Tesla's cheaper non-solar tiles which would blend in with the solar ones.

It would cost $69,100 to install a solar roof with 40-percent solar tiles on a 2,600-square-foot roof in suburban Detroit, according to Tesla's web site. That includes a $7,000 Tesla Powerwall, a battery unit that stores the energy from the solar panels and powers the home. The roof would be eligible for a $15,500 federal tax credit and would generate an estimated $62,100 in electricity over 30 years. Over that time period, Tesla estimates, the homeowner would save $8,500.

Tesla said the typical homeowner can expect to pay $21.85 per square foot for a Tesla solar roof. The cost can be rolled into the homeowner's mortgage payments and paid for over time, the company said.

Musk wouldn't say how many orders the company expects to get this year. He expects the initial ramp-up to be slow.

"It will be very difficult and it will take a long time, and there will be some stumbles along the way. But it's the only sensible vision of the future," Musk said.

Palo Alto, California-based Tesla Inc. is making the solar tiles at its Fremont, California, factory initially. But eventually all production will move to a joint Tesla and Panasonic Corp. factory in Buffalo, New York. Panasonic makes the photovoltaic cells used in the solar tiles.

Tesla said it will be installing equipment in the Buffalo factory over the next few months.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Tesla starts selling solar roof; says savings to cover costs

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DETROIT - Electric car maker Tesla has added another product to its lineup: Solar roof tiles. As of Wednesday, customers worldwide could order a solar roof on Tesla's web site. Installations will begin next month in the U.S., starting with California. Installations outside the U.S. will begin next year, the company said.

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Tunnel with nuclear waste collapses in Washington state - The Washington Post

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Tunnel with nuclear waste collapses in Washington state - The Washington Post

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SPOKANE, Wash. - A portion of an underground tunnel containing rail cars filled with radioactive waste collapsed Tuesday at a sprawling storage facility in a remote area of Washington state, forcing an evacuation of some workers at the site that made plutonium for nuclear weapons for decades after World War II.

Officials detected no release of radiation at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and no workers were injured, said Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology.

No workers were inside the tunnel when it collapsed, causing soil on the surface above to sink two to four feet (half to 1.2 meters) over a 400 square foot (37.1 square meters) area, officials said.

The tunnels are hundreds of feet long, with about eight feet (2.4 meters) of soil covering them, the U.S. Department of Energy said.

The cause of the collapse was not immediately known.

It was discovered as part of a routine inspection and occurred during a massive cleanup that has been under way since the 1980s and costs more than $2 billion a year. The work is expected to take until 2060 and cost more than $100 billion.

Hanford officials said they were studying the area of the collapse to determine how to create a barrier between the contaminated equipment in the tunnel and the outside air.

Workers near the site were evacuated and hundreds of others farther away were told to remain indoors for several hours, the federal agency said.

Non-essential workers among the labor force of 9,000 at the site were sent home early along a safe route.

"No action is currently required for residents of Benton and Franklin counties," the Energy Department said, referring to the nearly 300,000 residents near the site about 200 miles southeast of Seattle. "There is no indication of a release of contamination at this point."

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry was briefed on the incident that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee called it a serious situation.

"Ensuring the safety of the workers and the community is the top priority," said Inslee, a Democrat who previously represented the Hanford region in Congress.

The anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear said the incident helped show "radioactive waste management is out of control."

Democratic U.S. Sen Maria Cantwell of Washington said worker safety must be the priority.

"My thoughts are with the first responders who are working to assess the situation on the ground," she said.

Worker safety has long been a concern at Hanford.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit last fall against the Energy Department and its contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, contending vapors released from underground nuclear waste tanks posed a serious risk to workers.

Ferguson said that since the early 1980s, hundreds of workers have been exposed to vapors escaping from the tanks and that those breathing the vapors developed nosebleeds, chest and lung pain, headaches, coughing, sore throats, irritated eyes and difficulty breathing.

Lawyers for the Energy Department have said no evidence has been provided showing workers have been harmed by vapors.

The accident Tuesday occurred at a plant known as the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility, or PUREX, located in the middle of the 500-square-mile Hanford site - half the size of Rhode Island.

The PUREX building is the length of three football fields and was used to recover plutonium from irradiated fuel rods.

Hanford for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons and is now the nation's largest depository of radioactive defense waste, with about 56 million gallons of waste, most of it in 177 underground tanks.

As part of the huge, ongoing cleanup, rail cars full of radioactive waste were often driven into tunnels and buried.

The senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said he is requesting that the Energy Department brief the committee on the root cause of the collapse.

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone said the incident underscores the need for the department to take all necessary precautions to ensure the safety and security of workers.

The committee oversees the department's management of the cleanup efforts.

The Hanford site was built during World War II and made plutonium for most of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of the war.

- Associated Press writer Matthew Daly in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Tunnel with nuclear waste collapses in Washington state

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A portion of an underground tunnel containing rail cars filled with radioactive waste collapsed Tuesday at a sprawling storage facility in a remote area of Washington state, forcing an evacuation of some workers at the site that made plutonium for nuclear weapons for decades after World War II.

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Is Coal’s Political Heft Plunging? One State May Be Canary in Mine - The New York Times

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Is Coal’s Political Heft Plunging? One State May Be Canary in Mine - The New York Times

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The state ballot initiative would create a tax of $25 per ton on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, and use the revenue to cut one percentage point from the state sales tax, give a rebate of up to $1,500 for low-income families and effectively eliminate a tax on manufacturers.

Across the country, policy makers have taken notice. N. Gregory Mankiw, an economist at Harvard, who was the chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, said Mr. Bauman's proposal "could be exactly the right model for a national carbon tax."

"It's a global problem, so it can't be done only in one state," Mr. Mankiw said. "The answer has eventually got to be a global carbon price. But this is the right step to a global solution."

The coal industry sees Washington's efforts as a one-two punch. But what really scares coal executives is the prospect of a trend.

"It would have a devastating impact - it would eliminate the use of all fossil fuels," Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of the Ohio-based Murray Energy Corporation, said of a national carbon tax modeled on the Washington proposal. And that would come on top of grass-roots efforts like Mr. Grannis's to block companies like Murray Energy from shipping coal from Washington's coast.

Mr. Murray spoke disdainfully of those efforts. Although he would like to ship his coal to Asia through Washington, "they won't let me," he said. "So I'm taking it to Vancouver." Of local activists like Mr. Grannis, he said: "All they're doing is hurting themselves. It's a political movement. I don't have time for these radicals."

Over the past six years, six major coal export projects have been proposed in Washington and Oregon. After opposition from local and state agencies, American Indian tribes and activists like Mr. Grannis, only one project, in Longview, Wash., is still under active review, according to the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based environmental research group. The price of coal - and global demand for it - has also fallen, dampening the resolve by coal exporters to fight for their projects.

In a sign of how seriously the coal industry takes the actions by Washington residents, Matt Mead, the governor of Wyoming, traveled to Longview last year to make the case directly to its citizens, urging them to allow a new coal export terminal.

"The decisions those folks on the coast are making affect more than just the future of their state - it is deciding the future of citizens of Wyoming and Montana and other major coal states," said Mr. Mead, whose state is the nation's largest coal producer.

Mary L. Lyons, 64, a former office manager who retired to Longview from the Seattle area, was not impressed.

Though she has never been much involved in politics, promises about coal and its benefits brought back memories of a childhood trip through Appalachian coal country, where the poverty and environmental damage stayed in her memory, she said.

As Mr. Mead made his case, she stood up to challenge him, she recalled, and her involvement rolled on from there.

"It just made me really angry, that's all," she said.

For now, opponents of the coal terminals and supporters of the carbon tax appear to have a slight edge. A poll released on Oct. 24 by Elway Research, a Northwestern polling firm, found that 40 percent of voters surveyed supported the tax, 32 percent opposed it and 28 percent were undecided.

And supporters of the carbon tax have vastly outspent opponents. As of Oct. 27, Mr. Bauman's campaign to pass the carbon tax had raised $2.4 million and spent $1.4 million, while the campaign opposing the initiative had raised about $790,000 and spent just $411,000. About 23 percent of the money raised in favor of the tax was from outside the state, compared with about 51 percent of the money raised against it.

Those numbers also appear to bode well for the continuing efforts to block the coal export terminals, environmentalists say. But that does not mean the terminals are dead, said Clark Williams-Derry, the director of energy finance for the Sightline Institute.

"These things are zombies," he said. "They never quite die. They keep shambling forward even when their economic heart has stopped beating."

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Is Coal's Political Heft Plunging? One State May Be Canary in Mine

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The state ballot initiative would create a tax of $25 per ton on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, and use the revenue to cut one percentage point from the state sales tax, give a rebate of up to $1,500 for low-income families and effectively eliminate a tax on manufacturers.

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...good idea!

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When a hard rain falls on a city, it can turn quickly into an ecological disaster. That's because in 775 mostly older cities where sanitary and storm water sewers are combined underground, the rushing stormwater often overwhelms treatment plants, forcing a stew of oil, brake dust, heavy metals, pet and human feces into nearby waterways. The resulting pollution can shut down beaches, enter the food chain and contaminate drinking supplies.

The traditional and costly remedy for the problem of "combined sewer overflow" has been to build underground tunnels or sinks to capture the excess. In large cities, such as St. Louis, such projects can total close to $5 billion. But engineers are discovering greener and often cheaper ways to prevent water flowing into storm drains by recreating (and in some cases improving upon) the earth's natural filtering system.

Basically, these cities are becoming better sponges.

"We appeal for guidance to the ecosystems that are being taken away," explains North Carolina State University professor Bill Hunt, a stormwater expert. "We build a constructed stormwater wetland that's modeled on a naturally occurring wetland. It's not a perfect cognate," he says. "But it's close."

That's a big change from the past. "The old approach was to get stormwater into the pipe and into the ground as fast as possible," explains Jennifer Drake, who teaches at the University of Toronto's Department of Civil Engineering: "But in nature, it's a much slower process and the path is quite long, the water meanders so it doesn't end up overwhelming a downstream river or flooding the banks. So we want to create porous places within a city to act like a sponge."

These places include vegetated swales and bio-retention cells, fancy names for low tracts of land that collect and filter water, green streets and green roofs, rain gardens and rain barrels, bump-outs, infiltration galleries and pervious pavement. They are all designed to capture water and hold it until it until the water has either naturally percolated through the soil and been absorbed by plant roots or released into the atmosphere through the plants' leaves, a process known as evapotranspiration.

The beauty of an intensive investment in green infrastructure is that the impact goes well beyond curbing stormwater flow. Green roofs, road gullies, curbside bio-retention plots and swales planted with trees and flowers and designed to hold water while it seeps into the ground, not only clean the water, but provide carbon sequestration, which helps slow global warming and combat urban heat islands, where temperatures can be as much as 5 degrees higher than the surrounding countryside.

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"You're creating urban habitats," says Drake, "so you're also making pollinating spaces for bees, and public spaces that are beneficial for mental health."

Here are five cities using innovative green technology to manage stormwater runoff before it ever hits the drain:

Chicago - A 55-gallon rain barrel might not solve the world's stormwater runoff problems, since a 1,000-square-foot roof delivers more than 10 times that much water from a 1-inch rain. But rain barrels are still a vital tool, which is why the city spent $6 million over two years to give away 123,000 rain barrels to its customers. "It's the gateway drug into storm water management because it gets people thinking about water and thinking about managing water," says Hunt at North Carolina State University.

The key, notes David St. Pierre, executive director of Chicago's Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, is to encourage people to "disconnect" by removing their downspout from that direct connection to a main sewer line. "If you can take these direct stormwater connections out of system, that's your highest return on investment," he says. And while "it might be a rain barrel today, tomorrow it could be a 500-gallon cistern included underneath every new home, so that people could reuse their stormwater runoff in a very significant way."

Fayetteville, N.C. - This eastern North Carolina city, home of Fort Bragg, took a dilapidated, two-block slice of downtown already slated for revitalization and turned it into the state's first fully developed green street. A "road diet" eliminated three superfluous lanes, allowing a wider sidewalk and the creation of 13 sunken "landscape islands," where water enters through a break in the curbing. The islands are filled with 3 feet of "expensive dirt mixed with sand and organic topsoil," explains city engineer Giselle Rodriguez, who shepherded the project last year. Interlocking concrete pavers were put down in some parking areas, which also allow water to drain into the ground.

The goal of the $1.3 million project: to permit 85 percent of rainwater to drain into the ground instead of nearby Blounts Creek, where it would normally run. And it seems to work. Rodriguez says the green street was "able to tolerate Hurricane Matthew's 15 inches of rain without a problem."

Philadelphia - The nation's fifth-largest city announced plans to spend $2.5 billion from 2011 to 2036 to turn 10,000 acres into green spaces. That includes one-third of the impervious areas in the older, urban core, which has a combined sewer and stormwater system. By doing so, the city hopes eventually to cut stormwater pollution in local rivers and waterways by 85 percent.

But that's not all. As part of its stormwater management program, the city helps subsidize residents who want to replace their water-shedding driveways and concrete patios, with porous pavers. Philadelphia is also one of the few municipalities with a separate stormwater fee based on the percentage of a property's impervious surface. New developments the size of three townhouse lots or bigger are required to put systems in place that will guarantee the capture of the first inch of any stormwater runoff.

Oak Creek, Wis. - You've heard of highly efficient homes with net-zero energy use. Why not highly efficient developments with net-zero stormwater use? The town of Oak Creek, a few miles south of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, did just that with its 2016 Drexel Town Square development. The 85-acre site, a former Delphi Automotive plant, already had a large wetlands area, although it was dominated by cattails and red canary grass, an invasive species. So Sue Winnen, an environmental engineer for the town, decided to turn it into a "fully functioning wetland, with flowers and pollinators and birds, something that would soak up the water and hold it, while slowly releasing it into the ground."

Old parking lots were replaced with pervious pavers set on top of stone. After a rain, says Winnen, you can feel the water under the pavers as you walk on them. And a sloped parking lot sends that runoff into three bioswales on the opposite corner from the wetlands. The result: Despite a very wet spring, says Winnen, the amount of water flowing out of the entire development's sole drainage pipe is the equivalent of a few garden hoses of water.

Toronto - North America's first green roof bylaw took effect in Toronto in 2010 for commercial and residential buildings that had more than 20,000 square feet of floor space. Depending on the size of the building, anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of the available roof space must become a green roof, outfitted with a waterproof membrane, a growing medium, and plants. By the end of 2016, some 400 green roofs had either been built or were in the permitting process, covering the equivalent of about 61 football fields.

"There's not a sea of green roofs yet, just a patch here and a patch there," says Jane Welsh, the team lead for environmental policy in the Toronto planning department, looking out over Canada's largest city from her office on the 22nd floor. "But we get excited, of course. And there's a very strong perceptual flavor that you're starting to feel that Toronto is a green city."

T.R. Goldman is a writer in Washington. His last piece in Politico Magazine dug deep into advances in tunneling technology.

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Why Smart Cities Are Turning Themselves Into Sponges

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When a hard rain falls on a city, it can turn quickly into an ecological disaster. That's because in 775 mostly older cities where sanitary and storm water sewers are combined underground, the rushing stormwater often overwhelms treatment plants, forcing a stew of oil, brake dust, heavy metals, pet and human feces into nearby waterways.

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Clean coal: Firm claims world’s first commercially viable, zero-carbon power plant is ‘game changer’ | The Independent

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Clean coal: Firm claims world’s first commercially viable, zero-carbon power plant is ‘game changer’ | The Independent

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A revolutionary technique to capture carbon emissions from coal-fired power stations has been shown to work on a commercially viable basis for the first time, the company behind it has claimed.

If true, the breakthrough could allow coal to continue to be burned on a large scale around the world without producing the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

Anglo-Indian firm Carbon Clean Solutions Limited (CCSL) predicted its research - part funded by a £4.2m grant from the UK Government - would be a "game-changer".

While carbon-capture-and-storage systems have been tested on power stations, they have remained too expensive to make economic sense.

But a 10-megawatt power station in Chennai, India, is currently using CCSL's system to generate electricity on a commercial basis while capturing some 97 per cent of its carbon emissions, the firm's chief executive Aniruddha Sharma told The Independent. And he said it could run at 100 per cent.

The World Coal Association said the news was "genuinely very exciting", adding it was one of a number of developments in the field that could see the widespread adoption of carbon capture in about 10 years.

The issue hit the headlines over the weekend when Donald Trump predicted coal would "last for 1,000 years in this country", because of "a thing called clean coal", during the second US presidential debate.

CCSL says it developed a new solvent that makes the carbon capture process up to 66 per cent cheaper than traditional methods, costing $30 per tonne of carbon compared to $60 to $90.

Speaking to The Independent from India, Mr Sharma admitted some had doubted their method could work so well.

"There was some scepticism, but I hope this plant [in Chennai] will allay any concerns," he said.

"I think slowly people are gaining confidence and trust that, yes, this is possible and this is happening now.

"This is a project that is completely commercial - there's no Government grant, there's no subsidy. We got a bank loan.

"Clean coal is absolutely competitive with any form of renewable energy out there. At $30, I would say clean coal would be much cheaper than any other renewable forms of electricity.

"There is no doubt that clean coal is definitely going to play a very important role for UK and US energy power generation [and elsewhere]."

While the Chennai plant is relatively small, Mr Sharma said it would be possible to use their technique on large power stations that make significant contributions to the national grid.

"We can absolutely scale up the tech. We can go all the way to 1,000MW," he said.

Next month they plan to start taking people from the industry around the plant, with Mr Sharma saying: "Seeing is believing.

"Our technology is just making it easier for people to say 'yes, it works'."

While carbon capture has been associated with storing carbon - for example by returning it to coal mines - the material taken out of the Chennai plants emissions is made into soda ash, then sold to make a range of products from detergents to glass.

Asked about Mr Trump's endorsement of clean coal, Mr Sharma declined to comment.

The solvent was the brainchild of Prateek Bumb, CCSL's chief technology officer and co-founder.

"Our technology is certainly real. It is proven at scale and can significantly reduce the cost of carbon capture," he said.

"Moving to success with clean coal means finding an economic way to use the captured carbon dioxide or store it.

"By continuing to improve the economics of capture we hope to play our part in making carbon dioxide a cost-effective feedstock for many industrial processes, as we have shown in this project in India."

Mr Sharma said their firm had been created "out of a university dorm room with a vision we would be able to bring the cost of carbon capture down to a point where it makes commercial sense".

He suggested Mr Bumb was a candidate for a Nobel Prize, given the apparent significance of the new solvent.

"I absolutely would like it to happen. He definitely should get it - that's the dream," Mr Sharma said.

Benjamin Sporton, chief executive of the World Coal Association, said carbon-capture-and-storage was "an absolutely critical part of the climate mitigation portfolio".

"The work his company has done - this particular project is up and running - is genuinely very exciting," he said.

"It certainly does provide potential for the future. It's one of many developments in the carbon capture field that we are beginning to see."

However he expected it would take up to 10 years before carbon capture was widely used.

"We're talking in the next decade or so before we start to see a lot of these plants coming into play," Mr Sporton said.

The UK Government is currently consulting on plans announced last year to stop using "unabated coal" by 2025.

It set up a four-year, £1bn competition for firms to develop a viable system of carbon-capture-and-storage, but then controversially scrapped the prize just six months before it was due to pay out.

Mr Sporton suggested carbon capture could take off over the next decade, but might not do so in the UK.

"What I'd like to see from the UK Government is some policy towards CCS," he said.

"We had the decision last year to abandon the CCS competition. That was disappointing because that was a good opportunity to start seriously progressing CCS in the UK.

"If we are going to see CCS take off in the UK, we need some Government direction and some policies.

"As to whether or not we'll see a coal-fired CCS plant in the UK in the next 10 years, I'm not sure."

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Clean coal: Firm claims world's first commercially viable, zero-carbon power plant is a 'game changer'

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A revolutionary technique to capture carbon emissions from coal-fired power stations has been shown to work on a commercially viable basis for the first time, the company behind it has claimed. If true, the breakthrough could allow coal to continue to be burned on a large scale around the world without producing the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

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This Power Plant Set Out to Prove Coal Can Be Clean. Did It Work?

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This Power Plant Set Out to Prove Coal Can Be Clean. Did It Work?

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On a chilly, open plain in Saskatchewan, clean coal is getting its first big trial. The Boundary Dam power plant fired up last October, promising to generate enough electricity for 100,000 homes while capturing and reusing most of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide from its exhaust.

The world is watching. Since most of its electricity comes from fossil fuels, proponents say carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology like Boundary Dam's could be critical in heading off the worst effects of climate change. Can the $1.1 billion Canadian project prove them right?

The results so far are promising, but by no means final. Boundary Dam extracts 90 percent of the carbon from its smokestacks, then injects it into nearby oil wells to goose output. So far, it has captured 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to its operator, SaskPower.

When it's at full throttle by the end of this year, that number will go up to one million metric tons annually, SaskPower says-the same as taking more than 200,000 cars off the road. Its emissions would then be about one third that of a comparable new natural gas plant.

SaskPower president and CEO Mike Marsh was upbeat about the plant at an energy conference last week in Washington, D.C., but acknowledged it was still undergoing "a lot of fine-tuning."

Some environmental groups are supportive. "This is a great one-year anniversary," says John Thompson, director of the Fossil Transition Project for the Clean Air Task Force, calling Boundary Dam a "globally significant project."

Boundary Dam is one of just 14 CCS projects operating worldwide, and the only one attached to a power plant. Another big project, Southern Company's Kemper County Energy Facility in Mississippi, is running more than two years late and $4 billion-plus over budget.

The Sierra Club, which sued to stop Kemper, called the plant "dirty, expensive, and unnecessary."

Both Kemper and Boundary Dam rely on lignite, or brown coal, a lower grade fuel especially common in Germany and China, and both will use the carbon from processing that coal to extend the life of oil wells nearby.

Anyone concerned about the climate might ask: Why funnel those billions into extending our dependence on fossil fuels?

"Eliminating coal is a great bumper sticker as a pragmatic climate change option," Thompson says. "It fails miserably."

Too many fossil fuel plants, especially new ones in China, are already on track to spew greenhouse gas emissions for decades, and they need to be addressed, Thompson says. (Read about how tons of power plant emissions are likely locked in already.)

"The average person, they think CCS is about coal. It's not," Thompson says, noting that the technology can be used on plants both new and old, coal- or gas-fueled, and also at the many industrial sources of emissions. "You can't replace a steel mill with a windmill."

The average person, they think CCS is about coal. It's not.

Unlike the Kemper project, which involves building a new coal gasification plant with different carbon capture technology, Boundary Dam* was a retrofit of a decades-old unit that would have had to close under new regulations Canada passed in 2012.

"Did we take on some risk? Absolutely," Marsh says of the decision to go with CCS, which SaskPower made before the new Canadian rules were final. The alternative would have been to shut the plant and repower it with natural gas. Marsh says that CCS gave the company certainty it would meet the pending federal standard while avoiding the risk of higher natural gas prices in the future.

SaskPower's situation with Boundary Dam was unique-too unique, says Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative who focuses on CCS. For carbon capture technology to really take off, he says, countries need to require bigger pollution cuts while also providing the same kinds of financial incentives that renewables have received.

"It all comes down to economics, it's very simple," Herzog says. "The markets aren't there for CCS." The Department of Energy included significant tax credits for carbon capture in its 2016 budget proposal, which he says would spur more projects, but it's unclear whether those will be approved.

Low oil and natural gas prices aren't helping CCS either, particularly in the U.S.: It makes less sense now to pour carbon into mature wells than it did when oil prices hovered near $100 a barrel. Plus, many states can meet pending emissions goals by ramping up natural gas and renewables.

Herzog believes that UN-led climate talks, beginning November 30 in Paris, will lock in current U.S. emissions for the next decade. Still, John Thompson says, CCS can and will be a player as coal ramps up in other countries and the world eventually looks for even bigger, quicker ways to slash greenhouse gases.

"This is a technology that is going to be the main workhorse over the coming decades," he says. "You may not see it in the first 15 years, but you will see it when it matters."

* The Boundary Dam project uses Shell Cansolv technology to remove carbon dioxide from its flue gases. Shell is sponsor of The Great Energy Challenge, a special series that explores energy issues. National Geographic maintains autonomy over content.

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This Power Plant Set Out to Prove Coal Can Be Clean. Did It Work?

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On a chilly, open plain in Saskatchewan, clean coal is getting its first big trial. The Boundary Dam power plant fired up last October, promising to generate enough electricity for 100,000 homes while capturing and reusing most of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide from its exhaust. The world is watching.

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America’s first ‘clean coal’ plant is now operational — and another is on the way - The Washington Post

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America’s first ‘clean coal’ plant is now operational — and another is on the way - The Washington Post

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The first large scale U.S. "clean coal" facility was declared operational Tuesday - by the large energy firm NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp.

Their Petra Nova project, not far outside of Houston, captured carbon dioxide from the process of coal combustion for the first time in September, and has now piped 100,000 tons of it from the plant to the West Ranch oil field 80 miles away, where the carbon dioxide is used to force additional oil from the ground. The companies say that the plant can capture over 90 percent of the carbon dioxide released from the equivalent of a 240 megawatt, or million watt, coal unit, which translates into 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide per day or over 1 million tons per year. They're calling it "the world's largest post-combustion carbon capture system."

"There are not many coal plants that are being built these days," said Mauricio Gutierrez, the president and CEO of NRG. "We think that actually having an experience in installing a [carbon capture and storage] technology in existing coal plants will have a pretty significant application in the current plants that exist throughout the country, and for that matter, throughout the world."

But there is another coal plant near completion in the United States that will also capture carbon dioxide - but using a very different approach. It's the Kemper Plant, being operated by Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of Southern Co., and expected to be operational Jan. 31. This plant has been designed to turn lignite, a type of coal, into a gas called syngas, stripping out some carbon dioxide in the process. The syngas is burned for electricity and the CO2 is then again shipped to an oil field to aid in additional oil recovery.

Thus, at Petra Nova the capturing of carbon occurs after the coal has been burned - or "post-combustion" - whereas at Kemper, it happens beforehand.

The arrival of Petra Nova and Kemper comes as the incoming Trump administration will have to try to deliver on sweeping promises made to the struggling coal industry. It remains unclear if that will involve any type of support for carbon capture technology or for the industry, but Trump did allude to "clean coal" while campaigning.

The two very different plants together mark the arrival of a technology, often called "CCS" for short, that has been heralded as essential to the future of coal burning in particular (though it has many other applications), but has struggled despite considerable subsidies from the U.S. Department of Energy. Several projects have seen their Energy Department funding withdrawn, but these two now stand at or near the finish line.

According to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks this fledgling industry, there are 21 carbon capture projects worldwide on a large scale that are either operating or have been built, but relatively few of these are in the power generation sector - making Petra Nova and Kemper quite novel in context of the United States. In Canada, the Boundary Dam Carbon Capture and Storage Project, also a "post-combustion" capture plant using coal, has been operational since 2014.

The Energy Department provided grants totaling $ 190 million to the Petra Nova facility, which cost $1 billion overall. Kemper is a considerably more expensive project, representing a $6.91 billion expenditure for a massive plant with a capacity of 582 megawatts. That includes $270 million in support from the Energy Department, also as part of its Clean Coal Power Initiative.

The Department hailed the news Tuesday. "As the world's largest post-combustion carbon capture system, the Petra Nova project confirms that carbon capture and storage technologies can play a critical role in ensuring the nation's energy security and providing good jobs for American workers, all while helping us reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants," said Christopher Smith, Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, in a statement.

For Petra Nova, a key part of the operation of the plant involves its pairing of power generation with oil recovery. Carbon dioxide injected into the oil field will increase its production, and with oil prices at $50 a barrel or higher, the plant is economical, according to NRG spokesman David Knox. Some of the carbon dioxide then remains sequestered in the oil field after the enhanced oil recovery process.

The plant's completion is a milestone, says Gutierrez, and a doorway into a wider world of using carbon capture and storage. "I think in the future, this is a technology that is going to be necessary for gas units, as natural gas becomes this bridge fuel," he said.

Furthermore, Gutierrez said, while the Petra Nova plant is paired with an oil field to help make it economical, that may not always be so with future projects. "We really chose the enhanced oil recovery to improve the economics of the plant to the extent that there is not a price on carbon," he said. "Potentially that is not necessary to make the economics work."

The company does not have any immediate plans to adapt a second coal plant with carbon capture technology, but Gutierrez said that if it wanted to do so, the know-how gained at Petra Nova would make the second plant cheaper.

The International Energy Agency and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have both said that carbon capture and storage will be a necessary technology to curb humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.

"Any country that is in need to increase their power generation, and that is happening through fossil fuels, they will be looking at this technology as a way to mitigate the impact of carbon," said Gutierrez.
Read more at Energy & Environment: Antarctica is about to lose a huge piece of ice. Scientists aren't quite sure what will happen after that New Obama report warns of changing 'threat environment' for the electricity grid Methane may not last long in the atmosphere - but it drives sea level rise for centuries For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here and follow us on Twitter

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America's first 'clean coal' plant is now operational - and another is on the way

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The first large scale U.S. "clean coal" facility was declared operational Tuesday - by the large energy firm NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp.