ARCHAEOLOGY

‘Sutton Hoo king’s lost temple’ discovered in Suffolk
Sarah Knapton
Wed, November 22, 2023 

Treasure from the Sutton Hoo site on display at the British Museum - David Ro

A lost 1,400-year-old temple, said to have been built by the English king buried at Sutton Hoo, may have been discovered in Suffolk.

The Venerable Bede, a monk and historian, wrote that King Redwald, who died in AD 625, built a temple housing altars to both Christ and pagan gods.

The monarch, thought to have been the person buried in a ship at Sutton Hoo, was the first East Anglian king to convert to Christianity but also kept links to other religions.


The temple’s location was believed to have been lost in time, but archaeological teams have uncovered the remains of a building in Rendlesham, close to King Redwald’s burial place, which may be the site mentioned by Bede.

Volunteers from Rendlesham Revealed, a community archaeology project, made the discovery, along with that of a number of other buildings, during a dig earlier this summer, Suffolk County Council has revealed.

Excavations at Rendlesham, Suffolk - Jim Pullen/Suffolk County Council

“Its distinctive and substantial foundations indicate that one of the buildings, 10 metres long and five metres wide, was unusually high and robustly built for its size, so perhaps it was constructed for a special purpose,” said Prof Christopher Scull, of Cardiff University and University College London.

“It is most similar to buildings elsewhere in England that are seen as temples or cult houses, and therefore it may have been used for pre-Christian worship by the early kings of the East Angles. The results of excavations at Rendlesham speak vividly of the power and wealth of the East Anglian kings, and the sophistication of the society they ruled.”

King Redwald reigned from around 599 to his death, and was referred to in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a bretwalda – an Old English term meaning “Britain-ruler” or “wide-ruler”.

He is thought to be the most likely occupant of the Sutton Hoo ship burial. A second ship burial site was found nearby in 1998, which was thought to contain Regenhere, his son.

A dig in the same area last year by members of Rendlesham Revealed found evidence of a huge royal compound, including a large timber hall. The site was surrounded by a ditch of nearly one mile long that enclosed an area the size of 20 football pitches.

Volunteers excavating the remains of the ditch that enclosed the royal compound in Rendlesham - Suffolk County Council

Along with the temple, the new excavations this summer also uncovered evidence of fine metalworking associated with royal occupation, including a mould used for casting a decorative horse harness similar to that found at Sutton Hoo.

The archaeological discoveries show that Rendlesham has been a location for human settlement and activity for 6,000 years from the fourth millennium BC to the present day.

The council said the area was “most important” when it was a royal centre from the 6th to 8th centuries AD.

The latest dig also uncovered a Second World War searchlight emplacement, which was part of a searchlight battery recorded by US Force aerial photography in December 1943.

A schoolboy digging potatoes in Scotland found an ancient Egyptian statue. Nobody knows how it got there.

Mia Jankowicz
Tue, November 21, 2023 

A series of wild coincidences led to the discovery of ancient Egyptian artifacts buried in Scotland.

A student at a Scottish school unearthed the first ancient treasure in 1952.

Researchers are still figuring out how they got there.

Historians are piecing together the wild story behind a series of highly improbable finds of ancient Egyptian treasure — dug up thousands of miles away in Scotland.

It starts in 1952, when a schoolboy was digging up potatoes as a punishment for bad behavior at his school near the tiny village of Monimail, in Fife.

He struck something that he thought was a potato at first — but it turned out to be the head of an ancient Egyptian statue.

Historians discovered that the sandstone statue dated back to the mid-12th Dynasty, or about 1922 to 1855 BC.

More finds would follow.

Fourteen years later, the same boy — identified by historians as Mr McNie — was teaching at the school. He was running an exercise class when one of his pupils landed awkwardly on something sticking out of the ground.

Digging further, he unearthed an Egyptian bronze statuette of a bull, which historians dated to between 664 and 332 BC.

Then, in 1984, schoolboys who had explored the same site with a metal detector alerted a curator, Elizabeth Goring, to another find — an Egyptian bronze figurine.


Leaded ancient Egyptian bronze figurine of a priest dating to about 1069-656 BC, found at a school in Scotland.

National Museums Scotland

These discoveries — and the mystery of how they ended up in a Scottish schoolyard — are detailed in a new paper by Goring and fellow curator Margaret Maitland.

"When I saw the little bronze figurine of a man in 1984, it was obvious the three objects must be connected," Goring wrote.

Goring got one of the boys with the metal detector to show her where they found the figurine, so she could excavate further.

"We found nothing," she wrote.

But just as they were about to give up, one of the geologists wandered into a different area — and spotted another figurine lying on the ground. It was a "shabti," a small, mummy-shaped sculpture.


This ancient Egyptian faience shabti dates to about 664-332 BC and was found at a school in Scotland.

National Museums Scotland

That led to a whole trove of Egyptian objects being unearthed, which are now in the collection of National Museums Scotland.

Some of the finds turned out to be 19th-century copies, but many were genuine ancient relics.

But there was still the mystery of how they got there.

There's no documentation of anyone who owned the property, in its long history, having amassed a collection of Egyptian objects.

Before Melville House was a school, it had belonged to David Leslie-Melville, the 7th Earl of Melville.

Volunteers excavate the site at Melville House in 1984

National Museums Scotland

The most likely scenario, the researchers now say, is that the objects belonged to Melville's son, Viscount Balgonie, who visited Egypt sometime in 1856 to help with health issues.

His sisters, who were there with him, could have brought vendors selling artifacts to his sick bed while he was there, the researchers said.

Balgonie died a year later, back in Scotland, at the tender age of 24.

The researchers theorize that the objects were then consigned to an outbuilding, and forgotten. The outbuilding was later demolished, and the objects buried with the remnants.

Another theory suggests that they were kept away from the main house because of superstition.

"Pharoah's curse" rumors were just beginning to emerge at this time, the researchers said.

Archaeologists Think They Might Have Found the Real Noah’s Ark
Tim Newcomb
Updated Wed, November 22, 2023 

Scientists Claim They May Have Found Noah’s Arkgaiamoments - Getty Images


"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

Archaeologists believe they may have discovered the final location of Noah’s Ark on Turkey’s Mount Ararat.


Soil samples from atop the highest peaks in Turkey reveal human activity and marine materials.


Dating of the rock and soil from the location match with Biblical timing of Noah’s Ark.

Researchers from a trio of universities in Turkey and the United States have spent roughly a year analyzing the rock and soil in the famous Durupinar formation on Mount Ararat, the highest mountain in Turkey. They believe that the boat-shaped site may hold the ruins of the legendary Noah’s Ark.

The Biblical account of Noah tells of God instructing Noah to build a giant ark to spare his family and pairs of animals from an impending flood meant to destroy the evil and wickedness running rampant on Earth. Noah’s Ark is said to have come to rest on the mountains of Ararat following a 150-day flood about 5,000 years ago.

Researchers now believe they’ve found evidence of human activity near the boat-shaped formation in the mountains from between 5500 and 3000 BC.

Faruk Kaya, AICU vice rector professor, says that analyzing rocks and soil from the uniquely shaped area on the mountain shows human activity in the region, timed to the years following the flood in the legend of Noah’s Ark. “In terms of dating, it is stated that there was life in this region as well,” Kaya says, according to The Daily Mail. “This was revealed in the laboratory results.”

Human activity, however, does not a Biblical account prove. The Durupinar formation has been put forth as a potential ark resting place for many years, and has received extensive attention from those hoping to find Noah’s Ark. Despite the hype, archaeologists have consistently reaffirmed over the years that the formation is natural, not the result of a petrified shipwreck, and that there is no geologic record of a global flood like the one described in religious texts. Some believe that a more local flood may have been possible, but that is also debated.

The team says it isn’t currently possible to say that Noah’s Ark itself was at the Durupinar site.

“With the dating, it is not possible to say that the ship is here,” Faruk Kaya, one of the researchers on the project, said according to Turkish news publication Hurriyet. “We need to work for a long time to reveal this. In the next period, we agreed to carry out a joint study under the leadership of ITU, Andrew University and AICU. Three universities will continue their work in this field in the future.”

For now, the scientists point to the evidence in the soil of “clayey materials, marine materials, and seafood,” according to Hurriyet, within the geological formation as evidence.


The team of researchers placed a renewed focus on the region in 2021 by exploring varying geological areas—including the Durupinar formation, which is made of limonite that bears resemblance to a ship like Noah’s Ark. Further exploration led the team to take the rock and soil samples from the country’s highest peaks for laboratory analysis.

The story of God, Noah, his family, the animals in his care, and Noah’s Ark has caused much debate for centuries. The search for proof of this event will likely continue for some time, and only that time will tell if it is there to be found.

GOOD NEWS COMRADES

China’s CO2 emissions may be falling already, in a watershed moment for the world

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Tue, November 21, 2023

Xi Jinping has made a giant strategic and economic bet on clean-tech dominance, aiming to corner the world’s renewable market - CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS


China’s carbon emissions have either peaked already or will do this winter, seven years ahead of schedule. They may plateau for a year or two but will then go into exponential decline for mechanical and unstoppable reasons.

The country’s target of net zero by 2060 is likely to be achieved a decade earlier than previously assumed, and perhaps earlier than in Europe.

This is a remarkable turn of events. Xi Jinping has made a giant strategic and economic bet on clean-tech dominance, aiming to corner the world’s renewable market and to break dependency on sea-borne energy supplies running through the US 7th Fleet.

The International Energy Agency says China accounts for 60pc of all new solar and wind power being installed across the world this year and next. This roll-out has combined with a drastic slowdown in China’s rate of economic trend growth and the exhaustion of its Ponzi style property model.

Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, says China has reached a structural tipping point where the roll-out of renewables is outpacing the rise in electricity demand.

“A drop in power-sector emissions in 2024 is essentially locked in. We’re likely to see a fall in total CO2 emitted in the first half of next year,” he said.

China is building a gargantuan network of ‘clean energy bases’ in the Gobi, Ordos, and Tengger deserts, and further across the arid wastelands of the northwest. Solar and wind parks run along an arc from Inner Mongolia to Qinghai on the Tibetan plateau.

The electricity will reach the cities of industrial China through ultra-high voltage cables, which cut transition losses to 3.5pc per 1000 kilometres.

The scale is staggering. The Golmud Solar Park in Qinghai is already the world’s largest solar project with 2.8 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity, drawing on seven million panels stretching across the sands. The plan is to enlarge it six-fold within five years.

The regime is approving two new coal plants a week. It does not mean what many in the West think it means. China is adding one GW of coal power on average as back-up for every six GW of new renewable power. The two go hand in hand.

“The more renewable energy used, the more the need for coal peaking capacity. A large number of coal power units will be idle,” says Chinese coal expert Li Ting.

The coal plants will be used to buttress wind and solar rather than as baseload, and to avert a repeat of blackouts that traumatised the Chinese elites in 2021-2022.

Coal companies will be paid a subsidy under a capacity price mechanism unveiled earlier this month to keep reserve power. S&P Global says the capacity usage rate will fall to 25pc over the next two decades.

The coal that is burned will increasingly come with carbon capture. The mining province of Shanxi has a project underway to turn CO2 into ‘gold’ by making carbon nanotubes, which boost the power of lithium-ion batteries in EVs.

Mr Myllyvirta said the spike in Chinese emissions over the last two years is an anomaly caused by hydropower cuts following droughts. La Niña is now refilling the reservoirs of the Great Snowy Mountains and Tibet.

Putin’s war in Ukraine also led to a surge in coal use after liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices went through the roof. That episode is fading. China’s LNG imports were up 30pc in October from a year ago.

At the risk of overtaxing the reader’s appetite for figures, it is worth spelling out the enormity of what China is doing. The China Electricity Council says the country will add 210 GW of solar this year, twice the entire solar capacity installed in the US to date.

It is not going to stop there. Carbon Brief says China’s output of solar panels was 310 GW in 2022; it will be 500 GW in 2023; and 1000 GW in 2025 – four times the total installation of new solar worldwide last year.

China is undoubtedly getting over its skis. The grid cannot yet absorb so much renewable power. Curtailment is a chronic problem. But it is equally obvious that China will not let that stand in the way. The grid will catch up.

The ramp up of battery capacity is even steeper: 550 GWh in 2022; 800 GWh in 2023, and 3,000 in 2025. That will alleviate the shorter end of intermittency.

The point to remember about Xi is that he was green long before it became fashionable. He wrote a weekly column twenty years ago as Zhejiang party chief warning that China’s “energy-intensive and high-polluting” economic model was unsustainable.

He defied the orthodoxy of break-neck industrialisation and GDP worship, launching a radical ‘Green GDP’ programme in Zhejiang in 2004. It called on local governments to subtract ecological damage from the raw GDP figures.

He was defeated by vested interests, one reason why he has been careful not to force a showdown too soon with China’s powerful coal lobby. He is circumventing them instead by giving renewable companies priority access to cheap credit from the state-controlled banks.

The brains behind the Green GDP movement was Xie Zhenhua, today China’s climate negotiator and the man who paved the way for the Paris climate accord.

He helped Xi overcome entrenched opposition from China’s old guard by using a Kuznets Curve to show that a country’s CO2 emissions peak and decline naturally as it develops, and therefore that climate ‘concessions’ would not restrain China’s development.

This led to Xi’s Yingtai evening chat with Barack Obama, and the deal that made Paris possible.

Xie Zhenhua and US negotiator John Kerry have replicated the formula this month in advance of COP28 in Dubai, calling for a tripling of renewable energy by 2030, as well as carbon capture. It will not be easy for the carbon cartel to sabotage COP28 by turning it into a fight between the West and the rest.

The concept of ‘concessions’ is in any case jejune. China itself is at the sharp end of a ‘two degree’ world. The water towers of Tibet are heating twice as fast as global mean temperatures. Melting glaciers are causing spring floods followed by droughts. The aquifers of the North China plain are drying up.

Xi seeks global supremacy. He was never going to let climate worries alone hold back China’s rise. But today the two are in perfect alignment. Clean-tech has become the spearhead of China’s global economic conquest, and this changes the thrust of Beijing’s climate diplomacy.

It is no longer possible for foot-draggers to hide behind China. As Chinese emissions roll over and go into free-fall, Xi will become an even bigger problem for them than Western preachers.

As for those in Europe who think that a carbon border tax can protect the car industry against imports of cheap Chinese EVs, they delude themselves.

China’s battery king CATL will be making lithium-ion batteries at a zero-carbon gigafactory in Sichuan before Germany is anywhere close. The shoe could be on the other foot.

Whatever way you look at it, peak CO2 emissions in China is a watershed moment for global geopolitics, and for humanity.

Ørsted, Eversource install New York’s first offshore wind turbine

Diana DiGangi
Tue, November 21, 2023

The 130-MW South Fork Wind wind farm offshore New York has installed its first turbine, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office announced Monday.

The turbine is the first installed in the state, and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority said in a release that it anticipates South Fork Wind’s construction timeline is on track to make it the first completed utility-scale wind farm in the federal waters of the U.S.

“Hundreds of U.S. workers and three Northeast ports have supported South Fork Wind’s construction, helping to stand up the foundations of a new domestic supply chain that’s creating local union jobs across the Northeast,” said NYSERDA. “All 12 turbines are expected to be installed by the end of 2023 or early 2024.”

South Fork Wind’s turbines are sourced from wind engineering company Siemens Gamesa, according to the release. The farm is owned by Ørsted and is being developed by the company in an equal partnership with Eversource. Construction began in February 2022.

The farm is located 35 miles off Montauk and will bring power to Long Island, which the state hopes will “address a growing reliability challenge for Long Island’s electrical grid,” said NYSERDA.

New York has a mandatory goal to develop 9 GW of offshore wind by 2035. South Fork Wind is one of five projects in progress, and is the smallest of that group.

The other projects are the 1,230-MW Beacon Wind, the 816-MW Empire Wind 1, the 1,260-MW Empire Wind 2, and the 924-MW Sunrise Wind.

Hochul recently drew criticism from offshore wind groups after vetoing an offshore wind transmission planning bill due to a provision for the takeover of parkland in Long Beach to build transmission for Empire Wind 2.

The American Clean Power Association warned that the veto had the state coming “dangerously close to serving a death knell” for the financially troubled offshore wind industry. Just days later, Ørsted canceled two planned wind farms off the coast of New Jersey due to financial turmoil.

Hochul followed the veto by announcing solicitation awards for three new offshore wind projects on Oct. 25, and said the state was advancing the development of two offshore wind blade and nacelle manufacturing facilities – the first in the U.S.

On Monday, Hochul said that the South Fork Wind milestone “marks a momentous step forward” for the industry.

This story was originally published on Utility Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Utility Dive newsletter.

New wind turbine design with ‘surprising twist’ could revolutionize energy production: ‘The world needs them yesterday’

Ben Raker
Wed, November 22, 2023 

A radical new wind turbine design due to test soon in Norway has the potential to turn offshore wind energy production upside down — or at least sideways, with an unusual twist.

If successful, the “counter-rotating vertical-axis turbines” from Norwegian startup World Wide Wind (WWW) could, according to the company, reduce costs and double wind energy generation at sea by allowing builders to supersize floating wind turbines.

More broadly, wind power technology improvements like this can help reduce dependence on dirty energy sources that create heat-trapping gases that overheat the Earth.

At the heart of the new design are three key concepts.

One is that the design is floating, meaning it doesn’t have a structure built into the seafloor and is instead tethered to it. This in itself isn’t revolutionary, but it’s useful. Several huge wind farms are being built with floating technology. These can be sited in deeper-water areas, allowing access to more wind resources and making them less controversial for interrupting views.

A second part of the new design is that the blades turn on a vertical axis rather than a horizontal one. This ditches the usual “pinwheel” look of wind turbines in favor of an orientation like an upside-down stand mixer’s. It’s unusual, though at least one other company is exploring vertical-axis floating wind.

The third innovation makes the design truly stand out: adding another counter-rotating (aka contra-rotating) turbine and blades on the same axis but rotating in the opposite direction.

Photo Credit: New Atlas

The WWW design addresses several problems. Per New Atlas, it puts heavy, high-maintenance hardware near the base or underwater, which a top-heavy horizontal-axis turbine can’t do. This should allow the device to be taller and the blades larger (in wind energy, bigger is better).

With the design’s tilting vertical axis and blade configuration, it can capture wind from more directions and reduce turbulence in its wake (another issue with horizontal-axis turbines). This allows devices to be packed closer together in a wind farm, the company told New Atlas.

Last but not least, because of the opposite rotations of the turbines, the torque on the system (a vertical-axis issue) is neutralized, while the relative rotation is essentially doubled.

“Whichever way the wind‘s blowing, the floating double [vertical-axis wind turbine] passively tilts to an optimal angle, and the two turbines begin turning in opposite directions, effectively doubling the speed at which the ‘rotor’ is turning in the ‘stator,’” Loz Blain of New Atlas explained.

“You can think of that as a way to double your power generation, or as a way to reduce your generator cost by half,” Trond Lutdal, former CEO of WWW, told New Atlas in 2022. “So it‘s lower cost, it‘s much more scalable, and any maintenance happens at the bottom and not hundreds of feet up in the air.”

The test prototype, which WWW is partnering on with builder AF Gruppen, is 62 feet tall and has a 30-kilowatt production capacity. However, New Atlas said the company envisions scaling to 1,312 feet tall and 40 megawatts of capacity, or “nearly twice” what today’s largest wind turbines do.

New Atlas reported that a larger 1.5-megawatt prototype is scheduled for testing in 2025, with hopes of a 24-megawatt version — bigger than any current offshore turbine — being commercially available by 2030.

“Bring it on!” the outlet concludes. “If these massive machines do what they say on the tin, the world needs them yesterday.”

SCI-FI-TEK

Carbon removal is the latest way to fight climate change — but will it take off in time to save the planet?

Ben Adler
·Senior Editor
Wed, November 22, 2023

A handful of companies have begun to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store it underground in an effort to fight climate change. But challenges remain in ramping up the technology to a large enough scale that will make it affordable and effective enough to start to halt the rise of global temperatures.
How carbon removal works

Like giant stationary vacuum cleaners, machines suck CO2 from the air.


At the Orca plant operated by Climeworks in Iceland, the gas is then mixed with water and added to porous rocks underground, where it transforms into carbonate minerals.


At the new Heirloom plant in California, calcium oxide powder is combined with the extracted carbon dioxide to make limestone.

Offsets vs. carbon capture vs. carbon removal

Carbon offsets, like those people buy to mitigate carbon-intensive activities like air travel, claim to reduce CO2 through measures such as protecting forests or planting trees, but many have been exposed for inflating claims of averted emissions.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, refers to capturing CO2 emitted from smokestacks.

Carbon removal, known as “direct air capture” or DAC, isn’t tied to an emissions source and can be built anywhere. Unlike offsets, it provides a precise, easily measurable carbon reduction.

“I buy the gold standard of funding Climeworks to do direct air capture that far exceeds my family’s carbon footprint,” Bill Gates said when asked about his private jet use in February.

A direct air capture and storage facility operated by the Iceland-based Climeworks company. (Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg via Getty Images) (Bloomberg via Getty Images)
How to purchase carbon removal

Climeworks sells a range of monthly subscriptions, the cheapest of which costs $28 per month and removes as much carbon every month as roughly 11 grown average trees (20 kg of CO2), and they can create customized plans.


“We wanted to make our technology available to everyone,” Anna Ahn, a spokesperson for Climeworks, told Yahoo News.


The Orca plant removes roughly 4,000 tons of CO2 annually and the service is so popular it is sold out. If you buy a credit from Climeworks, you are prepaying for carbon removal that will occur when a new plant opens next year that will remove 30,000 tons of CO2 per year.


In 2021, the U.S. emitted 6.34 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents.


Heirloom is selling custom plans, mainly to companies. Both companies also have major corporate customers, including Microsoft.


“Carbon removal can be a lot more expensive than offsets, but what you’re paying for in terms of climate impact is radically different,” Brian Marrs, Microsoft’s senior director of energy and carbon, told the New York Times.

Recommended reading

Reuters: Climate tech company Heirloom opens U.S. commercial carbon capture plant

Independent: Carbon capture startup Climeworks removes CO2 from open air in ‘industry first’

Yahoo News: What Iceland's landmark carbon removal project means for the fight against climate change

Two samples of stones, one without CO2 injection (lower) and one with CO2 injection (upper), from a pilot project lead by ETH Zurich at a power plant near Reykjavik, Iceland. (Anthony Anex/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) (ANTHONY ANEX/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
But will it solve climate change?

Heirloom’s plant removes just 1,000 tons of CO2 per year, about 200 cars’ worth.

Heirloom says it wants to grow to millions of tons annually, and Climeworks says its goal is a gigaton per year by 2050.

Worldwide, scientists project the need for 10 billion gigatons of carbon removal per year by 2050.

Last week, Climeworks announced a partnership with Canadian firm DeepSky to build plants in Canada capable of removing up to 1 million tons per year of CO2, with the first to open before 2030.


The Biden administration has earmarked $3.5 billion for developing direct air capture hubs around the country, with the first grant recipients — a Texas project led by Occidental Petroleum and a Louisiana project from a technology contractor — announced in August.

A flux chamber, used to give a reading of how fast carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere, at the laboratory at Heirloom Carbon in Brisbane, Calif. (Loren Elliott/AFP via Getty Images) (AFP via Getty Images)

Canada is looking at a package of carbon removal subsidies worth $20 billion over five years.

Carbon removal may be impractical because of its high costs: Experts estimate that DAC costs more than $600 per ton of CO2 today and needs to drop below $200/ton by mid-century to adequately address climate change.

Heavy energy demands reduce environmental benefits, unless the electricity used to power carbon removal is all renewable (as it is in Iceland and at the Heirloom plant in California)

Fossil fuel companies could try to remove the carbon they produce to stay in business. ExxonMobil is investing in carbon removal.

Climeworks predicts that the cost will come down as the industry achieves economies of scale, just like the costs of solar energy and battery storage have dropped dramatically.

“There's a big, big scale-up that lies ahead of us,” Ahn said. “And with the scale-up, the costs will also reduce due to economies of scale, due to technology development.”

Why carbon capture is no easy climate solution

Reuters Videos
Wed, November 22, 2023

STORY: As the world tries to avoid a climate catastrophe, technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions have become central to many countries' climate strategies.

“...need to pursue the new technologies whether it's hydrogen or ammonia, or direct carbon capture...”

“We're working on decarbonisation... we're interested in carbon capture...”

“...essential that in the meantime we deploy the latest carbon capture, use and storage technology...”

So, what’s the state of the carbon capture industry now, and what are the challenges it faces?

The most common form of carbon capture collects the gas from a point source, such as a power plant.

The CO2 can then be moved to permanent underground storage.

Or, more commonly, it’s used for another industrial purpose first.

Currently, most of the CO2 captured this way is injected into oil wells to free trapped oil.

Drillers say this "enhanced oil recovery" method can make petroleum more climate-friendly, but environmentalists say it's counter-productive.

Industry data shows there are over 40 commercial point-source-capture projects operating around the world, with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

That’s about 0.13% of the world’s annual energy- and industry-related CO2 emissions.

Another form of the technology is “direct air capture”.

With some companies trying more creative solutions, like this one using ballooning to capture the gas in high altitudes.

Data from the International Energy Agency shows that only 27 direct air capture hubs have been commissioned globally, capturing just 10,000 metric tons of CO2 a year.

But some 130 facilities are planned around the world, with the U.S. announcing in August, $1.2 billion in grants for two, in Texas and Louisiana.

One key challenge is the tech’s high cost.

The price tag for point-source-capture projects range from $15 to $120 per metric ton of captured carbon.

With direct air capture, it can cost up to $1,000 per metric ton.

Some countries are trying to use public subsidies to get the projects going.

Such as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, that offers tax credits for every ton captured.

The cost is a tough sell when there’s little proof to show the technology is ready to be deployed at scale.

But developers of the tech say funding is crucial to push it further.

Here’s Shashank Samala, CEO of one of the firms that just won a federal grant for a capture hub in Louisiana.

“Two years ago, we were at a petri dish where we were removing grams of CO2 from the air. In two years, we went from grams to kilograms to hundreds of kilograms to tons, to soon hundreds of tons."

Where captured carbon can be stored is limited by geology.

And getting the carbon to storage sites could require extensive pipeline networks, or even shipping fleets, posing potential new obstacles.

Here’s U.S. climate envoy John Kerry summing up the concerns over carbon capture:

"'The jury's out on whether or not you're going to be able to capture enough emissions and contain them, and get the permissions you need to deploy the infrastructure and all the other things. Will it be competitive? Will it come online in time?"

But as countries gather for the 28th United Nations climate change conference, where they will look to hammer out ways to cut carbon emissions, many say it’s important to try every means possible.

Explainer-Why carbon capture is no easy solution to climate change

Wed, November 22, 2023 





: View of a model of carbon capture and storage designed by Santos Ltd, at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference in Brisbane


By Leah Douglas

(Reuters) - Technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions to keep them from the atmosphere are central to the climate strategies of many world governments as they seek to follow through on international commitments to decarbonize by mid-century.

They are also expensive, unproven at scale, and can be hard to sell to a nervous public.

As nations gather for the 28th United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates at the end of November, the question of carbon capture’s future role in a climate-friendly world will be in focus. Here are some details about the state of the industry now, and the obstacles in the way of widespread deployment:

FORMS OF CARBON CAPTURE

The most common form of carbon capture technology involves capturing the gas from a point source like an industrial smokestack. From there, the carbon can either be moved directly to permanent underground storage or it can be used in another industrial purpose first, variations that are respectively called carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS).

There are currently 42 operational commercial CCS and CCUS projects across the world with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks the industry. That is about 0.13% of the world’s roughly 37 billion metric tons of annual energy and industry-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Some 30 of those projects, accounting for 78% of all captured carbon from the group, use the carbon for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), in which carbon is injected into oil wells to free trapped oil. Drillers say EOR can make petroleum more climate-friendly, but environmentalists say the practice is counter-productive.

The other 12 projects, which permanently store carbon in underground formations without using them to boost oil output, are in the U.S., Norway, Iceland, China, Canada, Qatar, and Australia, according to the Global CCS Institute.

Another form of carbon capture is direct air capture (DAC), in which carbon emissions are captured from the air.

About 130 DAC facilities are being planned around the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), though just 27 have been commissioned and they capture just 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

The U.S. in August announced $1.2 billion in grants for two DAC hubs in Texas and Louisiana that promise to capture 2 million metric tons of carbon per year, though a final investment decision on the projects has not been made.

HIGH COSTS

One stumbling block to rapid deployment of carbon capture technology is cost.

CCS costs range from $15 to $120 per metric ton of captured carbon depending on the emissions source, and DAC projects are even more expensive, between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton, because of the amount of energy needed to capture carbon from the atmosphere, according to the IEA.

Some CCS projects in countries like Norway and Canada have been paused for financial reasons.

Countries including the U.S. have rolled out public subsidies for carbon capture projects. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, offers a $50 tax credit per metric ton of carbon captured for CCUS and $85 per metric ton captured for CCS, and $180 per metric ton captured through DAC.

Though those are meaningful incentives, companies may still need to take on some added costs to move CCS and DAC projects ahead, said Benjamin Longstreth, global director of carbon capture at the Clean Air Task Force.

Some CCS projects have also failed to prove out the technology's readiness. A $1 billion project to harness carbon dioxide emissions from a Texas coal plant, for example, had chronic mechanical problems and routinely missed its targets before it was shut down in 2020, according to a report submitted by the project’s owners to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Petra Nova project restarted in September.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Where captured carbon can be stored is limited by geology, a reality that would become more pronounced if and when carbon capture is deployed at the kind of massive scale that would be needed to make a difference to the climate. The best storage sites for carbon are in portions of North America, East Africa, and the North Sea, according to the Global CCS Institute.

That means getting captured carbon to storage sites could require extensive pipeline networks or even shipping fleets – posing potential new obstacles.

In October, for example, a $3 billion CCS pipeline project proposed by Navigator CO2 Ventures in the U.S. Midwest - meant to move carbon from heartland ethanol plants to good storage sites - was canceled amid concerns from residents about potential leaks and construction damage.

Companies investing in carbon removal need to take seriously community concerns about new infrastructure projects, said Simone Stewart, industrial policy specialist at the National Wildlife Federation.

"Not all technologies are going to be possible in all locations," Stewart said.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Fossil fuel industry keys in on unproven recycling methods to prop up plastics

Saul Elbein
Wed, November 22, 2023 

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has urged recycling as an alternative to bans or cuts in the single-use plastic filling world landfills and oceans.

Now, with the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28) just around the corner, the industry is making that pitch on a global scale — and using it to water down efforts to cut the use of fossil fuels.

That strategy was evident last week at the third Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting (INC-3) in Nairobi, Kenya — part of a process legally bound to secure an international agreement on plastics by 2024.

It began with high hopes and soaring rhetoric, with President William Ruto of Kenya — a country that has banned a wide array of single-use plastics — calling on negotiators to be “the first domino” in the “inevitable” change toward a world of greatly reduced plastic use.

Instead, negotiations ended in deadlock and confusion, as countries including Saudi Arabia and China joined trade groups such as the American Chemistry Council to fight the idea of in any way limiting the production of plastics.

More than 140 registered fossil fuel and plastics lobbyists attended, many attached to six national delegations — making them by far the largest bloc at the conference.

The army of fossil fuel and petrochemical representatives also outnumbered independent scientists 4 to 1 and outnumbered the collective delegations of the 70 smallest countries put together.

They entered a conference that had on its agenda the possible “phaseout” of particularly damaging and replaceable plastics — and proceeded to argue that no such thing was necessary. Instead, the petrochemical groups are holding out the hope of a “circular economy” in which waste plastic is indefinitely reused to form new plastic products.

Their weapons in this campaign: innocuous-sounding phrases like “national priorities,” “national circumstances,” the push for “a bottom-up approach” and a plea for “technological innovation.”

All of this, anti-plastics campaigners argued, sought to water down the original goal of the treaty, which was a binding and solid agreement that would meaningfully reduce the amount of plastics entering the environment.

That number is staggering: the equivalent of 2,000 dump trucks per day poured into the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans. One landmark 2017 study in Science found that 8.3 million tons of plastics had been produced to date, virtually all of which was still in landfills or the environment — and which was still dwarfed by the 12 million tons of plastic that study authors said would be in landfills or the environment by 2050 if nothing changed.

That profusion of plastic is an issue “of deep concern,” wrote a confederation of 60 U.N. member states calling itself the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution.

The alliance of countries, led by Norway and Rwanda, favored expanded recycling and new-model plastics that were easier to break down and remake into other products. But this took a distant back seat to their call for binding measures for countries to produce less plastic.

In particular, they pushed the chair to “eliminate and restrict unnecessary, avoidable, or problematic plastics,” starting with those most damaging to human health and the environment.

In addition to waste management — which one activist compared to mopping the floor from an overflowing bathtub — “we must also turn off the tap,” a representative from the coalition of small Pacific nations wrote.

For this group, “there is no difference between plastic and plastic pollution — plastic is pollution,” as Rafael Eudes of Brazil’s Aliança Residuo Cero, or Zero Waste Alliance, said in a statement.

This coalition urged the INC-3 chair to take decisive action to turn the hodgepodge of mutually contradictory suggestions that made up the prior session’s “Zero Draft” into a streamlined and condensed First Draft that would be ready for the next session.

But none of that is what happened. Negotiations ended with a Zero Draft that had massively expanded with both pro- and anti-plastics proposals — a draft that members, in another blow to momentum, were forbidden to work on before they meet again in April in Ottawa, Canada.

With only two meetings remaining before time runs out on the treaty process, that raises the real prospect of failure — a possibility that the plastic-reduction hawks argued was the aim of the far-smaller coalition of attending states and lobbyists that depend heavily on the profits from fossil fuels.

This coalition of about a half-dozen countries — including China, Russia and Iran — sought to convince members that production caps were unnecessary even for the most damaging and dangerous plastics — and that the solution was better “waste management” of the floods of plastic it still plans to produce.

“Primary plastics have become a cornerstone of modern society,” the Saudi delegation wrote before the meeting, referring to new “virgin” plastics pulled directly from fossil fuels.

“Phasing out their supply and demand would not only stifle technological innovations but also risk economic growth and stability,” the Saudi team wrote.

They were joined in this push by China, a major plastics producer whose negotiators wrote before the conference that “limiting the production of plastic polymers is not a straight solution to plastic pollution” and called to cut any such bans from the ultimate treaty.

While the U.S. didn’t formally join this bloc, its negotiators in Nairobi sought “to replace concrete global commitments with catchy buzzwords and unenforceable promises,” according to a summary from the Center for International Environmental Law.

The Biden administration’s own proposed plan for plastic waste also makes no mention of binding measures to cut plastic production. Instead, the administration is relying on an embrace of “voluntary” measures to reduce single-use plastic, new purchasing guidelines that steer government agencies away from single-use products and expanded recycling — measures roughly in line with those urged by the petrochemical industry.

This pro-plastic coalition’s principal talking point was summarized by Matthew Kastner of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a leading petrochemical lobby group that counts fossil fuel giants Exxon and plastics manufacturers Dow and DuPont among its members.

Kastner told Reuters last week that “the plastics agreement should be focused on ending plastic pollution, not plastic production.”

That depends on the idea that the plastic waste stream — more than 80 percent of which goes into landfills and the environment, and of which half of the remainder is simply burned — can be reconfigured into a closed “circular” loop.

As a groundbreaking 2020 report by NPR and Frontline found, that is a pitch that the industry has been making for decades — while knowing it was not able to deliver on it.

“There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech, NPR and Frontline found.

But recycling, a plastic trade group leader told them, did have one major attribute: It extended the public acceptance of plastics, or what is now called their “social license.”

“If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of what is now the Plastics Industry Association, told NPR.

The keystone of the modern version of this pitch is “chemical recycling,” which seeks to replace the grueling sorting-by-hand of soggy and smelly plastic waste into distinct recycling streams with a streamlined, automated process.

According to the industry pitch, this could allow for the creation of new plastics from the building blocks of the old. Kastner of ACC pointed The Hill to a list of 79 chemical recycling facilities globally that are “planned, operational or under construction.”

“Chemical recycling is a proven technology happening at commercial scale across the globe,” Kastner told The Hill.

He pointed to the “many products on the global marketplace using plastics remade from chemical recycling,” including a Dow initiative to use ground-up plastic to replace some of the asphalt in road tar and an ExxonMobil project to turn discarded fishing lines into shipping crates.

But these projects are tiny compared with the plastic waste stream: Against the 22 million tons of plastic that enters the environment annually, the Dow and Exxon projects have reused around 1,000 tons each — about one part in 22,000.

The amount the industry invests in advanced recycling — $8.7 billion according to the ACC — is also dwarfed by the $164 billion it put into the pipeline for new factories to produce virgin plastics in the U.S. alone.

In other words, the petrochemical industry has spent nearly 20 times as much on new plastics as on advanced recycling, which it says is key to the industry — and which it says is the reason that such new production need not be limited.

A report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) found that of the 37 “chemical recycling” facilities proposed since 2000, only three were still functioning as of 2020. The remaining three facilities were “plastics to fuel,” in which a mixed stream of plastics is broken down under heat provided by fossil fuels into a chemical slurry that can be added to fuels or burned for energy.

As reporting from ProPublica has found, this can be massively carcinogenic: One Chevron boat fuel additive derived from melted-down plastics was a million times more toxic than most new chemicals approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

EPA scientists found that anyone exposed to the fuel over a lifetime would get cancer — six times worse odds than the lung cancer risk of lifetime smokers. The agency ultimately decided to permit the fuel anyway.

And then there is the climate cost. The energy needed to create a kilogram of recycled polyethylene plastic from reused materials takes seven times as much energy as required to make a kilogram of similar plastics from fresh fossil fuels, Taylor Uekert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told The Guardian.

Uekert and other researchers at the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado found that the principal technologies that make most plastics-to-fuels — pyrolysis and gasification — were so environmentally damaging and energy-intensive that they could not reasonably be considered circular. The EPA no longer considers this to be recycling, according to the National Recycling Plan.

“You’re extracting fossil fuels that take a brief vacation as a piece of plastic — before they’re turned back into a fossil fuel and burned, using fossil fuels to power the process,” Claire Arkin of GAIA told The Hill.

Arkin described the push for chemical recycling and “circularity” as a reason to avoid production caps as akin to “a Pied Piper situation” and part of the same 50-year-long trajectory that “has put us in the dire situation that necessitated a plastics treaty in the first place.”

She added that “any time and money put into waste management one might as well throw down the drain if it’s not paired with reduction measures. Otherwise, we’ll be cleaning up forever as the world drowns in plastic.”

At the Nairobi conference, plastics spokespeople argued that plastics — which are still almost entirely produced from chemicals and energy derived from fossil fuels — were, in fact, a climate solution.

“Plastic products have tremendous value and benefits — they’re more affordable and versatile than alternatives, have lower [greenhouse gas] emissions profiles, and require less water and raw materials to make,” wrote the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) in a release aimed at Nairobi.

The AFPM added that American corporations were pushing for more recycling and the opportunity to use more recycled materials — but said that bans or caps on plastics production would scare them off.

Wyoming Wants to Sell 640 Acres Inside Grand Teton National Park

Katie Hill
Mon, November 20, 2023 

The Kelly parcel provides crucial habitat for wild bison, elk, pronghorn, and other species. It also provides ample hunting and fishing opportunities.


A 640-acre parcel of Wyoming trust land that's rich in wildlife habitat and hunting and fishing access is on the chopping block as the Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments considers auctioning it off to the highest bidder. The “Kelly Parcel,” which has been valued at over $62 million for its unfettered Teton views and access to the Gros Ventre River, also resides squarely within the Grand Teton National Park boundary.

The section's location is just one layer of this complicated issue, which is currently the source of much protest in Teton County and across the state. If the State Board of Land Commissioners votes to move forward with the auction, it would be the first time in U.S. history that a state body auctioned off a piece of land adjacent to a national park, the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance says. Wyomingites are concerned that the land would go to a real estate developer who would make quick work of the untainted expanse, building multi-million-dollar second homes and cashing in on the ever-growing wealth boom in the American West.

The parcel borders the Bridger-Teton National Forest and the National Elk Refuge and sits on an ancient elk and pronghorn migratory corridor. It also offers habitat to dozens of other species of nongame mammals, birds, and fish and hosts premier elk and bison hunting access and ample fishing opportunities on the Gros Ventre, according to Joel Webster, the vice president of Western conservation for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. If the National Park Service were to acquire the parcel, conditions allowing for bison hunting could be written onto the deed when it transfers hands, Webster tells Outdoor Life. (A very limited elk hunt already occurs in Grand Teton National Park every year as part of the park’s elk management strategy.)

The Kelly Parcel, labeled "State of Wyoming," is technically within the Grand Teton National Park boundary (purple). The National Elk Refuge (green) is to the southwest and the Bridger-Teton National Forest opens up to the east.

But even if bison hunting opportunities were lost in a NPS acquisition, he says, keeping the habitat intact is the obvious best-case-scenario for the conservation community.

“Given the importance of this parcel for fish and wildlife, specifically big game species, it makes the most sense for this piece to go to the Park Service. So whatever the state chooses to do, that needs to be the outcome,” Webster says. “The worst option is some big roller from New York City comes in, buys this land, and subdivides it. Not only are the hunting opportunities gone, but the wildlife habitat value is gone, too.”

In Wyoming, the Office of State Lands and Investments has a fiscal responsibility to the state’s public schools, from K-12 to the state university system. (State trust lands contribute funds and real estate to other state entities as well, like the penal and healthcare systems.) Revenue from state trust lands makes up a portion of the state’s education budget, which is also funded through mineral royalties, motor vehicle registration fees, and a variety of other sources. Currently, the only money the Kelly Parcel makes for the state comes from grazing leases, conservation easements, and “temporary use permits.” This revenue totals $2,845.65 a year, or .000046 percent of the current valuation of the land. (That’s less than half of one ten-thousandth of a percent.)

During a public meeting in Jackson on Nov. 9, one member of the public pointed out that, at $97,000 an acre, that would make this land shockingly cheap when compared to other property values in the region.

“Anyone else in the room shocked that an acre of land with pristine Teton views is appraised at $97,000?” she asked the room packed with concerned residents, according to Wyoming Public Media. “I’d like to buy one—or five. That’s crazy!”

Although the unidentified speaker suggests the property is undervalued, the process by which the $62,425,000 valuation was reached is detailed in a 156-page appraisal report from July 2022. Even if the parcel is fairly priced and the land were to go to auction, it would be difficult for the NPS to win a bidding war against private sector money.

The state has always planned to transfer the state’s four inholdings in Grand Teton National Park to the DOI, per an agreement between the state and the NPS from 2010. The first purchase—mineral rights on the Jackson Lake Parcel—happened in 2012. The second purchase occurred in 2013 when the DOI bought the 86-acre Snake River Parcel from the state for $16 million. Then, after much back-and-forth, the state sold the 640-acre Antelope Flats Parcel to the DOI for $46 million in 2016. This transfer occurred through legislative action at the state level, which solidified both the buyer and the price in the bill. The Kelly Parcel is the state’s final inholding in Grand Teton National Park, and the state has tried and failed multiple times to legislate the transfer.

The public comment period on the proposal will remain open until Dec. 1. The State Board of Land Commissioners will vote on the proposal on Dec. 7.

Consumer groups, lawmakers seek to reduce impact of $2 billion cost of closing Wisconsin coal plants

Karl Ebert, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Wed, November 22, 2023 

WEC Energy Group's recent announcement that it will be coal-free by 2032 is likely to bring new urgency to questions about how to pay off outstanding debt on unwanted coal-generation plants and whether utilities should be able to profit from them even after they're shut down.

WEC, the parent company of We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service Corp., recently laid out a schedule that reiterates its commitment to closing the four oldest coal-burning units at Oak Creek over the next two years, while for the first time putting a 2031 closing date on what will be the last coal-burning plant operated by the state's largest utilities.

The company estimates replacing coal generation with renewable energy resources will result in about $2 billion in customer savings over the next 20 years, including $50 million in operations and maintenance costs at Oak Creek.

Alliant Energy is projecting similar savings as it prepares to shut down its two remaining coal-burning plants by 2026.

That's welcome news for customers, but retirement of the plants doesn't, in and of itself, mean lower electricity bills.
How to handle millions in debt remains to be determined

The shutdowns are driven by changed energy economics that have made wind and solar cheaper than coal, resulting in plant retirements before millions of dollars of debt owed to bondholders and investors are repaid. Those costs need to be recouped, and that money will come from the utility's electric customers.

Statewide, the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group estimates those "sunk costs" will add up to more than $2 billion dollars, mostly due to pollution controls installed by the utilities in the past decade.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin's utilities project billions in spending to develop renewable resources to replace the coal-burning plants and meet future demand, costs that also will be borne by ratepayers.

Those costs are a necessary step toward meeting state, local and corporate carbon reduction goals, but they can be counterbalanced by measures that prevent utilities from profiting on that outstanding debt, said Tom Content, executive director of the Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board.

"Nobody was banking on spending all that money and not having that generation last," Content said. "But the economics of coal changed, the utilities' decarbonization plans and interest in renewable energy changed. The shareholders are doing very, very well on all this new investment and we really want customers to get a break on plants that are no longer being used shut down. That's why our our tagline is no profit for dead coal."
Bill would expand options for reducing customer burden

Wisconsin has a little-used system for protecting customers from some of those costs, a financing tool known as securitization.

First authorized by the state Legislature in 2004, securitization involves issuing bonds to refinance the remaining value of a coal plant. The savings come from the difference between the interest rate on the bonds and the rate of return, or profit, the utility would otherwise be able to collect from customers. In Wisconsin, utilities' profits rates are between 9% and 10%.

More than a decade passed before the law was used for the first time, when We Energies refinanced $100 million in outstanding debt after it decommissioned the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant in 2018. Refinancing that debt is estimated to save We Energies customers $40 million over 15 years.

We Energies also agreed last year in a proposed settlement of its rate case to securitize $100 million of the $656 million it still owes on the Oak Creek power plant. That agreement was rejected by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, which sought more information about the amount for refinancing and whether it could be bigger.

The We Energies Power Plant in Pleasant Prairie closed in 2018. The following year the Wisconsin Public Service Commission approved refinancing $100 million of the plant's unpaid debt resulting in about $40 million in savings for for the utility's electric customers.

Why refinance only part of that debt? The answer is twofold.

First, state law limits the use of securitization to certain pollution controls. That was the rationale for using it to refinance only about one-fourth of the outstanding debt at Pleasant Prairie.

Second, refinancing requires a utility to forgo profit on the plant's remaining value, which can be at odds with maximizing shareholder returns, and the law requires securitization to be voluntary.

Those issues came into play earlier this month, when the PSC set Alliant's 2024 and 2025 gas rates. In comments submitted during the rate case, consumer advocates and the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group argued for securitization of some, if not all of the $385 million in remaining debt on air-pollution control equipment at Alliant's Edgewater Generating Station. Those costs represent the majority of the $472 million that's still owed on the plant, which is scheduled to shut down in 2025.

PSC Chairwoman Rebecca Cameron Valcq pointed out that securitization was off the table because Alliant had not proposed it despite a request from commissioners during the previous rate case for the company to come back with a suite of financing alternatives.

"It's clear that the state statute as is currently written does not allow this commission to require securitization to be used. It is as clear as the day is long. That's the way the statute is written," Valcq said. "So all of the noise about requiring them to securitize, requiring them to use environmental trust financing, all that time and energy, in my opinion, would be better utilized, lobbying for changes to the statute, because we're not within our authority to order securitization. If it comes to us as a proposal, we have an ability to look at it."

As commissioners reviewed each of the investor-owned utilities' rates over the past month, they repeatedly stressed that finding ways to reduce the impact on customers of shutting down coal plants needs to be included during consideration of their next rate adjustments.

"I think all utilities adequately put on notice that this is going to be an issue," Valcq said during final consideration of We Energies' 2024 rates.

Alliant Energy plans to close the Edgewater Power Plant, a coal- powered generating facility in Sheboygan in 2025.

Proposal would allow utilities to refinance all plant retirement costs

A bill introduced recently by state Sens. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, and Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, would change that. The bill would allow utilities to refinance all of the costs associated with retiring a coal plant and also give the PSC authority to order securitization.

Cowles said the bill is an attempt to provide some relief for the state's electric customers at a time when large increases in electric rates have pushed Wisconsin electric costs above most other Midwest states.

"We''ve got something like $2.5 billion of plants that are going to close, and the idea is that you're going to rate base all this? Rather than securitize it?" Cowles said. "If you securitize it, you're going to be able to do it in a much cheaper way. That's the purpose of the bill."

The bill also would require utilities to submit biennial resource and reliability plans to the PSC to ensure new construction best meets the state's needs and provide advance notification to the PSC of any plans to shut down large power-generating facilities.

Todd Stuart, executive director of the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group, said the manufacturers WIEG represents, 25 of the state's largest energy users, share consumer advocates' concerns about rising electric rates. Stuart declined to comment directly on Cowles' legislation, but he noted WIEG has been an active proponent of using securitization in the We Energies and Alliant rate cases.

"Now is a good time to raise questions regarding the speed and cost of the massive utility capital spend in Wisconsin," he said. "We still need to address the problem of rate recovery for power plants that are about to be retired."

The state's utilities have already voiced their opposition to the bill through the Wisconsin Utility Association, the lobbying group that represents the state's investor-owned gas and electric utilities. WUA circulated a memo earlier this month urging lawmakers not so sign on as co-sponsors of Cowles' bill and several others that aim to create greater transparency on energy issues for consumers.

"They need to be free to make their own financial decisions at the best time for when they believe them to be instead of having the commission order them. They just need the flexibility to be able to do that when it's appropriate," said Bill Skewes, WUA's executive director.

Cowles said that opposition was not unexpected and overcoming the utilities' lobbying power is no small challenge. But, he believes, recent electric rate increases across the state have put the issue of energy costs at the forefront of all classes of utility customers and lawmakers are hearing about it.

"Hopefully we get a hearing on this bill, and hopefully the commissioners come, or at least the chairman comes in and says we want this authority," Cowles said. "And hopefully the governor comes in. This is one of these things where we have an opportunity to make things less financially difficult for people. Do we take advantage of it or not? We'll see."

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Bill aims to cut customer impact of $2 billion cost of closing Wisconsin coal plants

India wants private money for coal-fired plants despite Western opposition

Sarita Chaganti Singh
Tue, November 21, 2023



 Smoke billows from the cooling towers of a coal-fired power plant in Ahmedabad

By Sarita Chaganti Singh

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India on Tuesday asked private firms to ramp up investments in new coal-fired power plants to meet a dramatic rise in electricity demand and bridge nearly 30-gigawatts of additional requirement by 2030, despite international pressure to stop building such facilities.

India's power and renewable energy minister R K Singh in New Delhi asked private companies to invest in coal projects and "not miss the growth opportunity," according to three sources present in the meeting.

The Indian government meeting with private investors comes weeks before the U.N. climate conference, at which France, backed by the United States, plans to seek a halt to private financing for coal-based power plants, according to a Reuters report.

India's power ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The private investment share in the Indian power sector started dwindling after 2018, when it was more than, or at par with, government investments. Currently, it stands at 36% of the country's total installed capacity.

Most of the coal-based capacity under development is being set up by state-owned companies, with Adani Power and JSW Energy the only private companies building such plants.

Many private companies stopped building new coal-based plants in India over a decade ago due to a lack of financing in the absence long-term power supply bids from consumers.

In recent years, however, energy demand has outpaced expectations in India, the world's most populous country, as economy activity picked up.

Since August, the South Asian nation's energy demand rose 18% to 20% year-on-year. The government expects it to rise by at least 6% annually till end of this decade.

During the meeting, Singh said new estimates see India's peak power demand reaching 335-gigawatts by 2030 versus the present 240-gigawatts, according to the three sources.

Private power companies were told that the majority of the peak-hour electricity demand in India can be met by coal-based power stations, since storage technologies are costlier to support solar and wind-based energy generation, officials said.

A total coal-based capacity addition of 58 gigawatts is in the pipeline, leaving an expected gap of over 30-gigawatts, they said.

"The Minister assured that the government may look at funding support to such projects (from private firms) from state-run financiers such as Power Finance Corp and REC Ltd," one of the sources said.

All three sources at the meeting asked not to be identified as they were not authorized to speak to media.

Singh told the meeting that despite adding coal-based capacity, India will still meet its climate goals of shifting to 50% non-fossil-based power capacity since the country is also adding renewable energy projects.

(Reporting by Sarita Chaganti Singh; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Exclusive-France, US to propose ban on private finance to coal-fired plants at COP28 - sources

Sarita Chaganti Singh, Kate Abnett and Valerie Volcovici
Mon, November 20, 2023 

 'Cop28 UAE' logo is displayed on the screen during the opening ceremony of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week (ADSW) under the theme of 'United on Climate Action Toward COP28', in Abu Dhabi

By Sarita Chaganti Singh, Kate Abnett and Valerie Volcovici

NEW DELHI/BRUSSELS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - France, backed by the United States, plans to seek a halt to private financing for coal-based power plants during the U.N. climate conference later this month, three sources familiar with the deliberations told Reuters in India and Europe.

The plan, which was communicated to India earlier this month, will deepen divisions at the COP28 summit in Dubai running from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, with India and China opposed to any attempt to block construction of coal-fired power stations for their energy-hungry economies.

France's minister of state for development Chrysoula Zacharopoulou told the Indian government about the plan, called the "New Coal Exclusion Policy", for private financial institutions and insurance companies, two Indian officials said.

The plan to stop private financing for coal-fired power plants has not been previously reported.

A spokesman for Zacharopoulou did not directly comment on emailed queries from Reuters but said the question of financial investments in coal had been discussed at several different multilateral forums over the past few years.

India's environment, power and renewable energy, coal, external affairs and information ministries, the OECD and the French embassy in New Delhi did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

A source in Europe familiar with the plan said the aim was to dry up private funding for coal power and that it was a top priority for French President Emmanuel Macron during COP28, seen as a crucial opportunity to accelerate action to limit global warming.

The proposal provides for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to set coal-exit standards for private finance firms whose financing could be tracked by regulators, rating agencies and non-governmental organisations, the two Indian officials said.

The U.S., European Union and Canada, among others, have been seeking a plan to expedite the phase-out of coal, which they have cited as the "number one threat" to climate goals.

They are concerned private international financing continues to support large additions to coal capacity in developing nations, according to the plan shared by France with India.

Some 490 gigawatts of new coal capacity, roughly equal to one-fifth of existing global capacity, is planned or under construction, mostly in India and China, the officials said.

Rick Duke, Deputy U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change, did not comment directly on the proposal but noted the expansion in coal-fired plants.

"We are pushing to set an expectation globally that countries need to join us in the fastest possible power sector transition, including all that clean power deployment," Duke said.

"And countries need to stop digging a deeper hole by building new unabated coal power plants, because unfortunately, there's still some 500 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants in the pipeline globally, and the IPCC and the International Energy Agency have both been quite clear that that needed to stop already."

Member countries are divided on emissions abatement technologies that are yet to evolve to commercial scale for use in developing countries, one of the Indian officials said.

About 73% of electricity consumed in India is produced using coal, even though the country has increased its non-fossil capacity to 44% of its total installed power generation capacity.

The country intends to resist the push to fix a deadline for a fossil fuel phase-out or phase-down at COP28, as coal will be its main energy source for a few more decades, and may ask members to shift their focus on reducing emissions from other sources. It may also push developed nations to become carbon negative rather than carbon neutral by 2050.

(Reporting by Sarita Chaganti Singh, Valerie Volcovici in Washington and Kate Abnett in Brussels; Additional reporting by Benjamin Mallet in Paris; Editing by Sonali Paul)

Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

Sarah McFarlane and Susanna Twidale
Updated Tue, November 21, 2023

A wind turbine and an electricity pylon are seen in Finedon, UK

LONDON (Reuters) - Giant batteries that ensure stable power supply by offsetting intermittent renewable supplies are becoming cheap enough to make developers abandon scores of projects for gas-fired generation world-wide.

The long-term economics of gas-fired plants, used in Europe and some parts of the United States primarily to compensate for the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, are changing quickly, according to Reuters' interviews with more than a dozen power plant developers, project finance bankers, analysts and consultants.

They said some battery operators are already supplying back-up power to grids at a price competitive with gas power plants, meaning gas will be used less.

The shift challenges assumptions about long-term gas demand and could mean natural gas has a smaller role in the energy transition than posited by the biggest, listed energy majors.

In the first half of the year, 68 gas power plant projects were put on hold or cancelled globally, according to data provided exclusively to Reuters by U.S.-based non-profit Global Energy Monitor.

Recent cancellations include electricity plant developer Competitive Power Ventures decision announced in October to abandon a gas plant project in New Jersey in the United States. It cited low power prices and the absence of government subsidies without giving financial detail.

British independent Carlton Power dropped plans for an 800 million pound ($997 million) gas power plant in Manchester, northern England, in 2016. Reflecting the shift in economics in favour of storage, this year it launched plans to build one of the world's largest batteries at the site.

"In the early 1990s, we were running gas plants baseload, now they are shifting to probably 40% of the time and that's going to drop off to 11%-15% in the next eight to 10 years," Keith Clarke, chief executive at Carlton Power, told Reuters.

Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run.

MODELS UNDER SCRUTINY

Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said.

Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate.

"It does become more complex," Nigel Scott, head of structured trade and commodity finance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, said.

Investors are putting increased scrutiny on the modelling, he added.

Banks are focused on financing plants that have guaranteed revenues, three bankers involved in energy project finance said, asking not to be named because they were not authorised to speak to the press.

Many countries world-wide, but especially in Europe, provide payments for standby power plants through capacity markets. In these markets, power producers bid to be back-up suppliers.

The system has long been criticised by environmental campaigners on the grounds it can amount to a subsidy to fossil fuel. Its advocates say it is necessary to ensure the smooth integration of renewable power and that the payments can also reward batteries.

Those selected to provide back-up generation are paid to keep plants ready to come online at short-notice to meet peak demand, or to cover for outages at other plants, or to compensate for variance in wind or solar power generation.

These payments can improve the economics for gas-fired plants, but are insufficient to guarantee long-term profits.

Carlton Power secured a capacity auction contract for its planned UK gas plant, but had to relinquish it because of delays in securing investment due to uncertainty over the project's future revenues.

The UK first introduced a capacity market in 2014, and more than a dozen countries followed with similar schemes.

Battery and interconnector operators are also participating in these auctions, and have begun to win contracts.

The cost of lithium-ion batteries has more than halved from 2016 to 2022 to $151 per kilowatt hour of battery storage, according to BloombergNEF.

At the same time, renewable generation has reached record levels. Wind and solar powered 22% of the EU's electricity last year, almost doubling their share from 2016, and surpassing the share of gas generation for the first time, according to think tank Ember's European Electricity Review.

"In the early years, capacity markets were dominated by fossil fuel power stations providing the flexible electricity supply," said Simon Virley, head of energy at KPMG. Now batteries, interconnectors and consumers shifting their electricity use are also providing that flexibility, Virley added.

RISING RISKS

The start-up in March of UK energy company SSE's Keadby 2, a gas power plant in eastern England, was supported by a 15-year government contract signed in 2020 to provide standby electricity services to the grid from 2023/24. The plant was financed by the company before it had the standby contract, and took four-and-a-half years to build.

The economics for such a plant would look different now, said Helen Sanders, head of corporate affairs and sustainability at SSE Thermal.

"I don't think we'd be taking an investment decision without revenue security through some sort of mechanism now because of the inherent risk associated with revenue security," Sanders said.

"If you're investing in something purely based on merchant market exposure, you're really going to have to see very, very high power prices, if you're only running for a lower number of hours."

Efforts to cut carbon emissions may add another cost to fossil-fuel plants: countries including the UK and the United States are considering requiring operators to retrofit plants with carbon capture infrastructure.

European Union rules introduced in January require gas plants seeking to access green finance to be built with carbon capture or be able to switch to using low carbon gases such as hydrogen from 2035.

OFF SWITCHES, EVs

As the energy transition gathers pace, other developments may reduce the need for back-up plants.

UK energy retailer Octopus Energy last year ran trials that offered to pay households a small fee to stop using electricity for an hour at a time during periods of strong demand.

The trials covered the equivalent amount of power demand that a small gas plant would meet, or what could be saved by turning off more than half of London for an hour.

Electric vehicles are a further disrupter as they can be charged when demand is weak and then power homes or send power back to the grid during peak demand periods.

A typical EV sits parked 90% of the time with a battery capable of storing enough energy to power the average modern home for two days, energy software platform Kaluza said in a report published in December.

In Europe, 40 million electric vehicles are expected by 2030, capable of displacing around one third of the region's gas power capacity, according to Kaluza.

"There are lots of things the grid can look to when it starts to look away from conventional generation," Carlton's Clarke said.

($1 = 0.8025 pounds)

(Reporting By Sarah McFarlane and Susanna Twidale; Editing by Simon Webb and Barbara Lewis)