News round-up, Wednesday, December 21, 2022
“Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.”
Seaboard’s CEO in the Dominican Republic, Armando Rodriguez, explains how the Estrella del Mar III, a floating hybrid power plant, will reduce CO2 emissions and bring stability to the national grid…
“The final act of Donald Trump’s presidency played out in the House of Representatives, on December 19. At the end of its work, the select committee formed after the attack by militiamen and Trump supporters against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, inspired by his incendiary and conspiracy rhetoric, recommended that the Department of Justice initiate criminal proceedings against the man it believes instigated the events.”
Altice delivers innovative, customer-centric products and solutions that connect and unlock the limitless potential of its over 30 million customers over fiber networks and mobile…
Clean Energy Quest Pits Google Against Utilities
Google says its goals for carbon-free power are impeded by state-regulated utilities, particularly in the Southeast, that lack a competitive market.
By Peter Eavis
Reporting from Atlanta
Dec. 20, 2022
It was the sort of dry panel discussion that occurs at hundreds of industry conferences every year — until a Google representative decided it was time to unleash.
“This is personal for me,” Jamey Goldin, an energy regulation lawyer at Google, told those attending a May conference in Atlanta on renewable energy in the Southeast. He said he had grown up on a ridge overlooking Plant Bowen, a coal-fired power plant northwest of Atlanta owned by Georgia Power, the dominant electricity utility in the state, and then directed his comments at a lobbyist for the utility’s parent company, also on the panel: “Y’all got a lot of coal running up there, a lot of smoke going up in the air.”
Overturning the system that puts nearly all power generation in the Southeast in the hands of utilities like Georgia Power would “get a lot more renewable energy online and a lot of that dirty power offline,” Mr. Goldin added.
But the outburst was more than personal. It was part of a far-reaching campaign by Google to power its operations with increasing amounts of electricity from wind, solar and other generating sources that do not emit carbon.
Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, among others, have made eliminating their carbon emissions a prominent corporate goal — and have set not-too-distant deadlines to get there. Google wants to buy enough carbon-free electricity to power all its data centers and campuses around the world without interruption by the end of this decade.
The corporate quest to rapidly secure vast new amounts of renewable energy faces big challenges, however — not least in the Southeast, one of the country’s fastest-growing regions. And Google’s battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what’s good for a few companies good for all?
At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region’s electricity — and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so.
Such markets exist in some form in much of the country, but the Southeastern utilities are staunchly defending the status quo. Senior utility executives contend that their system better insulates consumers from spikes in prices of commodities like natural gas, promotes reliability and supports the long-term investments needed to develop clean-power technologies.
“We absolutely are superior in every regard to those markets over time,” Thomas A. Fanning, chief executive of Southern Company, Georgia Power’s parent company, said in an interview.
A Revolution Avoided
Most electricity in the United States was long generated and distributed by heavily regulated monopoly utilities in each state. But just before the start of this century, lawmakers and regulators, arguing that competition would bring efficiencies, made it possible to set up power markets and end the dominance of the utilities — a revolution that bypassed the Southeast.
Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.
Self-interest also plays a role: In power markets, large companies can strike deals with independent producers that give them more leeway to bargain on price and secure more clean energy. Google entered a landmark deal last year to provide clean power to its data centers in Virginia, which is in a sprawling market called PJM.
Now supporters of the approach have an opportunity to usurp the utilities in the Southeast. South Carolina passed a law in 2020 to explore setting up a power market, a move considered remarkable because of the influence the utilities have in state capitals; similar legislation failed to advance in North Carolina last year.
Tom Davis, a Republican state senator in South Carolina who spearheaded the bill, said the current regulatory system financially rewarded utilities even when they messed up. “It’s not incentivizing them to go out there and try to find somebody who’s built a better mousetrap and can generate power more cheaply,” he said.
Setting up a power market within South Carolina is one option, but Caroline Golin, Google’s global head of energy market development and policy, went further at a legislative hearing in July, raising the possibility of South Carolina’s breaking out of the Southeast utility system and joining PJM.
“We can be a model for the rest of the region, and actually be a model for the rest of the country,” she said.
Markets and Renewables
The big utilities in the Southeast are now building more solar projects, but those pushing for a market in the region say it’s not enough.
In the region, the proposed solar projects’ generating capacity is equivalent to just over a fourth of total capacity, which is far below the 80 percent for PJM, according to an analysis by Tyler Norris, a senior executive at Cypress Creek Renewables, a solar company, and a special adviser in the Energy Department during the Obama administration.
“Project developers are attracted to open wholesale electricity markets with price transparency, independent oversight and the ability to trade with multiple potential customers,” Mr. Norris said.
To show how markets can stoke the growth of renewables, supporters sometimes point to Texas, whose power market, ERCOT, is one of least regulated in the country. Last year, wind power accounted for nearly 23 percent of Texas’ generation, up from 8 percent in 2011.
Critics say the Texas market system led to much of the fragility that caused power outages during the winter storm that was responsible for over 200 deaths in 2021. But others note that ERCOT was structurally isolated from neighboring power markets, preventing it from drawing power from those areas when plants in the ERCOT market froze up in the storm.
In addition, some experts question the degree to which markets drive the growth of renewables, saying certain states’ geography and weather lend themselves to wind and solar power. With its vast and gusty unpopulated spaces, Texas is naturally set up for wind power.
“We happen to have seen more wind and solar in areas where markets have been deregulated,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in the economics of renewable energy. “But I think that’s more of a geographic and political phenomenon than a market phenomenon.”
And in the Southeast there is evidence that government mandates can do more than markets to promote the growth of renewables.
In North Carolina, where lawmakers have long pushed the development of solar energy, the power source made up 7.6 percent of net generation last year, well above the national average and double the share in neighboring Virginia, in a market.
“We expect North Carolina to continue to be a leading state for solar,” said Erin Culbert, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, which is a major utility operator in the Southeast.
United States: The Capitol attack and Donald Trump's devastating legacy
EDITORIAL
Even after the January 6th committee recommended prosecution against the former president, the Republican Party still finds itself unable to stand up to him.
Le Monde
Published on December 20, 2022
The final act of Donald Trump's presidency played out in the House of Representatives, on December 19. At the end of its work, the select committee formed after the attack by militiamen and Trump supporters against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, inspired by his incendiary and conspiracy rhetoric, recommended that the Department of Justice initiate criminal proceedings against the man it believes instigated the events.
The charges are serious: inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstructing an official proceeding (the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election), and making false statements. The severity of these charges reflects a situation unprecedented in the history of the United States: a full-fledged coup attempt.
These recommendations add a full stop to a presidential term of sound and fury, punctuated by two impeachments in the House of Representatives, which was controlled by the Democrats but where Republicans will have the majority in January. With the exception of a handful of conservative elected officials who paid for it with their political careers, the Republicans did everything to prevent the work of this committee from having a cathartic effect, to the great misfortune of American institutions.
It will now be up to Special Counsel Jack Smith, appointed on November 18 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to decide whether or not to prosecute all or some of these charges. He will face the delicate task of investigating a man who has already declared himself a candidate for the next presidential election and who is determined to denounce, once again, once too many, a political maneuver.
Blindness
Mr. Smith will have at his disposal thousands of documents accumulated by the select committee during its work. This makes for rich material, despite the refusal to testify from close advisers to the former president, some of whom the committee also recommends prosecuting.
Two lessons can already be drawn from this provisional epilogue. The first is about the Republican Party, which is apparently incapable of opposing the man who has been dragging them down since he became their mentor. If they end up turning away from him, it will be less out of a democratic reflex than out of the realization that Mr. Trump is making his side lose by being unable to get out of denial about Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election – as evidenced by the midterm election results. This blindness is all the more regrettable seeing as the defeats suffered by the candidates most mired in the lie of a stolen election show that it has become a red line for many voters in the United States.
The second lesson, fed by the work of the House select committee, is in fact a reminder. The most serious threats to American democracy today come from a supremacist far right, whose rhetoric Mr. Trump has trivialized. The weight of militias that were at the forefront of the January 6 attack are evidence of this. This situation is, unfortunately, not unique to the United States. The dismantling of an extremist network in Germany that also targeted the country's institutions bears witness to the same insurrectionary temptation. This calls for increased vigilance.