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    How Utilities Use Money From Your Bills to Block Clean Energy

    To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to make two big transitions at once: First, we have to generate all of our electricity from clean sources, like wind turbines and solar panels, rather than power plants that run on coal and methane gas. Second, we have to retool nearly everything else that burns oil and gas — like cars, buses and furnaces that heat buildings — to run on that clean electricity.These changes are underway, but their speed and ultimate success depend greatly on one kind of company: the utilities that have monopolies to sell us electricity and gas.But around the country, utility companies are using their outsize political power to slow down the clean energy transition, and they are probably using your money to do it.State regulators are supposed to make sure that customers’ monthly utility bills cover only the cost of delivering electricity or gas and to set limits on how much utilities can profit. But large investor-owned utilities, with legions of lawyers to help them evade scrutiny, bake many of their political costs into rates right alongside their investments in electrical poles and wires. In doing so, they are conscripting their customers into an unknowing army of millions of small-dollar donors to prolong the era of dirty energy.Fortunately, Colorado, Connecticut and Maine passed laws this spring that prohibit utilities from charging customers for their lobbying, public relations spending and dues to political trade associations like the American Gas Association and the Edison Electric Institute. Regulators in Louisiana are considering similar policy changes. Every state in the country should follow those leads.These reforms are crucial because while all corporations in the United States can spend money on politics, in most cases, consumers who don’t approve can take their business elsewhere. Utilities — as regulated monopolies — have the unique ability to force customers to participate.It’s not that utilities aren’t interested in building and profiting from clean energy. Many are doing so, and the Inflation Reduction Act offers utilities extensive tax incentives to increase their investments in wind, solar and batteries. But that does not mean that utilities want others to do the same. They will support a clean energy transition only if it happens exclusively on their terms and at their pace — a stance at odds with the scope and urgency of the herculean task of decarbonizing our electric grid.Most electric utilities view distributed energy — technologies owned by customers that generate electricity in smaller amounts — as a threat to their business. They have tried for years to stop their customers in many states from investing in rooftop solar by rigging rates to make it less economically attractive. They’ve also funded opposition to policies that would speed clean energy.Florida Power & Light spent millions of dollars on political consultants who are accused of engineering a scheme to siphon votes to third-party ghost candidates, according to reporting by The Orlando Sentinel. The ghost candidates never campaigned, but their names appeared on ballots for competitive State Senate seats in an effort to spoil the chances of Democrats who had been critical of the utilities. One of the Democrats had repeatedly introduced legislation supportive of rooftop solar power, which Florida Power & Light has crusaded against for years, including writing legislation in 2021 that would have slowed its growth. “I want you to make his life a living hell,” the utility’s chief executive wrote in an internal email. The legislator lost by fewer than 40 votes. Florida Power & Light has denied wrongdoing in the ghost candidate scandal.Utilities also have also fought to cling to plants powered by fossil fuels as long as possible. In Ohio the utility FirstEnergy concealed $60 million in bribes through a web of dark-money groups to the political organization of the state’s speaker of the House. Before his conviction and sentencing for this instance of racketeering, he helped pass a law that secured a $1.3 billion ratepayer-funded bailout for FirstEnergy’s bankrupt nuclear and coal plants, gutted the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards for utilities and bailed out coal plants owned by other utilities. Audits showed that FirstEnergy used money collected from ratepayers in its scheme.Electric utilities have even opposed policies to hasten the development of desperately needed long-range transmission wires for clean energy, as NextEra Energy, Florida Power & Light’s parent company, spent millions to do in New England, where NextEra generates and sells power from oil and gas.And many utility conglomerates don’t just sell electricity; they also sell methane gas, a serious threat to decarbonization efforts. Many of those gas utilities are fighting tooth and nail against local communities’ efforts to electrify our buildings and using ratepayers’ money to do so. In California, SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas distribution utility, has been caught illicitly and repeatedly misusing ratepayer money to fight cities’ building electrification plans. In New York the gas utility National Fuel reportedly made its customers pay for advocacy materials directing New Yorkers to oppose pro-electrification policies.The Colorado, Connecticut and Maine laws address these tactics by prohibiting utilities from charging customers for a suite of political activities. Other states and the federal government should go further in two ways:First, they should add mandatory enforcement provisions so that if utilities illegally charge customers for political activities, stiff and automatic fines would kick in.Second, policymakers should, at minimum, require that utilities disclose all political spending. The recently passed state laws won’t stop utilities from spending their profits on politics. The post-Citizens United campaign finance landscape makes it difficult to restrict such expenditures, but it does not protect companies’ ability to spend secretly, which is how utilities like FirstEnergy, Florida Power & Light and SoCalGas have attempted their most noxious influence campaigns.Utilities are too central to the clean energy transition to be allowed to dictate our energy and climate policies based on their profit motives. Limiting their influence gives us the best chance to move quickly and affordably to a safer and cleaner future.David Pomerantz is the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    ‘Where’s My Flying Car?’ Is a Legitimate Question

    In December, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that they had achieved on Earth what is commonplace within stars: They had fused hydrogen isotopes, releasing more energy in the reaction than was used in the ignition. The announcement came with enough caveats to make it clear that usable nuclear fusion remains, optimistically, decades away. But the fact that nuclear fusion will not change our energy system over the next year doesn’t mean it shouldn’t change our energy ambitions for the coming years.There are three goals a society can have for its energy usage. One is to use less. That is, arguably, the goal that took hold in the 1970s. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” is the key mantra here, with the much-ignored instruction to reduce coming first for a reason. Today, that ambition persists in the thinking of degrowthers and others who believe humanity courts calamity if we don’t respect our limits and discard fantasies of endless growth.The second goal is to use what we use now, but better. That is where modern climate policy has moved. The vision of decarbonization — now being pursued through policy, like last year’s Inflation Reduction Act — is to maintain roughly the energy patterns we have but shift to nonpolluting sources like wind and solar. Decarbonization at this speed and scale is so daunting a task that it is hard to look beyond it, to the third possible goal: a world of energy abundance.In his fascinating, frustrating book “Where Is My Flying Car?” J. Storrs Hall argues that we do not realize how much our diminished energy ambitions have cost us. Across the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the energy humanity could harness grew at about 7 percent annually. Humanity’s compounding energetic force, he writes, powered “the optimism and constant improvement of life in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.”But starting around 1970, the curve flattened, particularly in rich countries, which began doing more with less. In 1979, for instance, Americans consumed about 10.8 kilowatts per person. In 2019 we consumed about 9.2 kilowatts a person. To a conservationist, this looks like progress, though not nearly enough, as a glance at CO2 emissions will confirm. To Hall, it was a civilizational catastrophe.His titular flying car stands in for all that we were promised in the mid-20th century but don’t yet have: flying cars, of course, but also lunar bases, nuclear rockets, atomic batteries, nanotechnology, undersea cities, affordable supersonic air travel and so on. Hall harvests these predictions and many more from midcentury sci-fi writers and prognosticators and sorts them according to their cost in energy. What he finds is that the marvels we did manage — the internet, smartphones, teleconferencing, Wikipedia, flat-screen televisions, streaming video and audio content, mRNA vaccines, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, to name just a few — largely required relatively little energy and the marvels we missed would require masses of it.But they are possible. We’ve flown plenty of flying car prototypes over the decades. The water crises of the future could be solved by mass desalination. Supersonic air travel is a solved technological problem. Lunar bases lie well within the boundaries of possibility. The path that Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, outlined for nanotechnology — build machines that are capable of building smaller machines that are capable of building smaller machines that are capable of, well, you get it — still seems plausible. What we need is energy — much, much more of it. But Hall thinks we’ve become an “ergophobic” society, which he defines as a society gripped by “the almost inexplicable belief that there is something wrong with using energy.”Here, Hall’s account drips with contempt for anyone who does not dive out of the way of today’s industrialists. He reaches back to old H.G. Wells stories to find the right metaphor for where our civilization went sideways, finding it in the feckless Eloi, a post-human race that collapsed into the comforts of abundance. The true conflict, he says, is not between the haves and the have-nots but between the doers and the do-nots. “The do-nots favor stagnation and are happy turning our civilization into a collective couch potato,” he writes. And in his view, the do-nots are winning.“Where Is My Flying Car?” is a work of what I’d call reactionary futurism. It loves the progress technology can bring; it can’t stand the soft, flabby humans who stand in the future’s way. There is nothing inexplicable about why country after country sought energy conservation or why it remains an aim. A partial list would include poisoned rivers and streams, smog-choked cities, the jagged edge of climate change and ongoing mass extinction and the geopolitical costs of being hooked on oil from Saudi Arabia and gas from Russia.Hall gives all this short shrift, describing climate change as “a hangnail, not a hangman” (for whom, one wants to ask), and focusing on the villainy of lawyers and regulators and hippies. He laments how the advent of nuclear weapons made war so costly that it “short-circuited the evolutionary process,” in which “a society that slid into inefficient cultural or governmental practices was likely to be promptly conquered by the baron next door.”Hall’s sociopolitical theories are as flimsy as his technical analyses are careful. His book would imply that countries with shallow public sectors would race ahead of their statist peers in innovation and that nations threatened by violent neighbors would be better governed and more technologically advanced than, say, the United States.Among his central arguments is that government funding and attention paradoxically impedes the technologies it’s meant to help, but — curiously for a book about energy — he has little to say about the astonishing progress in solar, wind and battery power that’s been driven by public policy. He predicts that if solar and wind “prove actually usable on a large scale,” environmentalists would turn on them. “Their objections really have nothing to do with pollution, or radiation, or risk, or global warming,” he writes. “They are about keeping abundant, cheap energy out of the hands of ordinary people.”But on this branch of the multiverse, most every environmentalist group of note fought to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really the Deploy Solar and Wind Everywhere and Invest in Every Energy Technology We Can Think of Act. And if they had their way, it would have been far bigger and far better funded.Indeed, the existence of Hall’s book is a challenge to its thesis. “Where Is My Flying Car?” is now distributed by Stripe Press, the publishing offshoot of the digital payment company Stripe, which was started by two Irish immigrants in California. That state is the home of the postmaterialist counterculture that Hall sees as the beating heart of Eloi politics, and there is little fear of a near-term invasion by Mexican forces. Even so, California has housed a remarkable series of technological advances and institutions over the past century, and it continues to do so. The fusion breakthrough, for instance, was made by government scientists working in, yes, Northern California. There is an interplay here that is far more complex than Hall’s theories admit.But Hall’s book is worth struggling with because he’s right about two big things. First, that the flattening of the energy curve was a moment of civilizational import and one worth revisiting. And second, that many in politics have abandoned any real vision of the long future. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our politics mainly to give voice to our fears or urgency to our agendas. We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible.The remarkable burst of prosperity and possibility that has defined the past few hundred years has been a story of energy. “Take any variable of human well-being — longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population — and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in “The Wizard and the Prophet.” “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the 18th and 19th centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil and natural gas.”Without energy, even material splendor has sharp limits. Mann notes that visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was freezing in Versailles, and no amount of wealth could fix it. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of hundreds of slaves, but his ink still froze in his inkwells come winter.Today, heating is a solved problem for many. But not for all. There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality. The demographer Hans Rosling had a striking way of framing this. In 2010 he argued that you could group humanity by the energy people had access to. At the time, roughly two billion people had little or no access to electricity and still cook food and heat water by fire. About three billion had access to enough electricity to power electric lights. An additional billion or so had the energy and wealth for labor-saving appliances like washing machines. It’s only the richest billion people who could afford to fly, and they — we — used around half of global energy.The first reason to want energy abundance is to make energy and the gifts it brings available to all. Rosling put this well, describing how his mother loaded the laundry and then took him to the library, how she used the time she’d once spent cleaning clothes to teach herself English. “This is the magic,” he said. “You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books.” There is no global aid strategy we could pursue that would do nearly as much as making energy radically cheaper, more reliable and more available.Then there is all we could do if we had the cheap, clean and abundant energy needed to do it. In a paper imagining “energy superabundance,” Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado sketch out some of the near-term possibilities. “Flights that take 15 hours on a 747 could happen in an hour on a point-to-point rocket,” they write. Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people, and desalination, which even now is a major contributor to water supplies in Singapore and Israel, would become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible, giving us a path to reversing climate change over time.Vernon and Dourado’s definition of superabundance is fairly modest: They define it as every person on Earth having access to about twice the power Icelanders use annually. But what if fusion or other technologies give us energy that becomes functionally limitless? I enjoyed the way Benjamin Reinhardt, a self-proclaimed ergophile, rendered this kind of world, writing in the online journal Works in Progress:You could wake up in your house on the beautiful coast of an artificial island off the coast of South America. You’re always embarrassed at the cheap synthesized sand whenever guests visit, but people have always needed to sacrifice to afford space for a family. You say goodbye to yours and leave for work. On your commute, you do some work on a new way of making high-temperature superconductors. You’re a total dilettante but the combination of fixed-price for infinite compute and the new trend of inefficient but modular technology has created an inventor out of almost everybody. Soon enough, you reach the bottom of the Singaporean space elevator: Cheap space launches, the low cost of rail-gunning raw material into space and decreased material costs made the whole thing work out economically. Every time you see that impossibly thin cable stretching up, seemingly into nothingness, it boggles your mind — if that’s possible, what else is? You check out the new shipment of longevity drugs, which can only be synthesized in pristine zero-G conditions. Then you scoot off to a last-minute meet-up with friends in Tokyo.As you all enjoy dinner (made from ingredients grown in the same building and picked five minutes before cooking) a material scientist friend of a friend describes the latest in physics simulations. You bask in yet another serendipitous, in-person interaction, grateful for your cross-continental relationships. While you head home, you poke at your superconductor design a bit more. It’s a long shot, but it might give you the resources to pull yourself out of the bottom 25 percent, so that your kids can lead an even brighter life than you do. Things are good, you think, but they could be better.The fusion demonstration is a reminder not of what is inevitable but of what is possible. And it is not just fusion. The advance of wind and solar and battery technology remains a near miracle. The possibilities of advanced geothermal and hydrogen are thrilling. Smaller, modular nuclear reactors could make new miracles possible, like cars and planes that don’t need to be refueled or recharged. This is a world progressives, in particular, should want to hasten into existence. Clean, abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built.“In 100 or 200 years, everything will look radically different,” Melissa Lott, the director of research at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. “Folks will look back and be blown away by how we used energy today. They’ll say, ‘Wait, you just burned it?’”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Losing our marbles over Stonehenge | Brief letters

    Donald Trump’s acquittal in the US Senate (Report, 14 February) surely provides the best possible evidence for never allowing politicians to get involved in judicial decision-making. Their priorities lie in other directions. Les Baker Fordingbridge, Hampshire• The Queen gets £220m a year for seabed lease options for windfarms (Queen’s property chief delays sale of Scottish seabed windfarm plots, 12 February). Really? Perhaps she could give the country her cut given the future costs of the climate crisis, Covid and the expected hardships to come? Stephen King London• While I can empathise with Elizabeth Kerr (Letters, 11 February) my own travel aspirations are more mundane. I would just like to be able to visit Scotland to hand-deliver the teddy bear I have bought for my first grandchild, born six weeks ago. Nick Denton Buxton, Derbyshire• I assume that the original site in Wales was the manufacturer’s showroom (Dramatic discovery links Stonehenge to its original site – in Wales, 12 February). After all, you wouldn’t buy a circle of standing stones unless you’d seen it standing up and circular, would you? Katy JennisonWitney, Oxfordshire• If the people of Wales call – quite rightly – for the return of the “Preseli marbles” (Letters, 12 February) please can the stones go home by the same route and method so that we can all enjoy the spectacle? Sue BallBrighton More

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    How Sustainable Is the Rally in Renewable Energy Stocks?

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Sustainable Is the Rally in Renewable Energy Stocks?Solar and wind power companies have soared in value. Are they in a bubble or in a virtuous upward cycle?Installing solar panels on a rooftop in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Solar power is the cheapest source of electricity in many countries, according to the International Energy Agency.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York TimesJan. 14, 2021Updated 1:50 p.m. ETThe overall stock market was fabulous last year, but as investors focused on climate change, renewable energy stocks did even better.Consider that while the SPDR S&P 500 Exchange-Traded Fund Trust, which tracks the benchmark S&P 500, returned 18.37 percent in 2020, the Invesco Solar E.T.F., which tracks an index of solar energy stocks, soared 233.95 percent, according to Morningstar Direct. The Invesco WilderHill E.T.F., which invests more broadly in alternative energy of various types, rose 204.83 percent.Returns like those are so strong that they are unlikely to be replicated: It is possible that the stocks of companies engaged in carbon-free energy production are already in a bubble. Jason Bloom, head of fixed income and alternative E.T.F.s for Invesco, describes the sector this way: “I would call it rational optimism in view of improving fundamentals.”The International Energy Agency recently called solar-generated energy the “cheapest” electricity source in many countries. In the United States, it accounts for just 3 percent of energy output, but it is increasing rapidly. Wind power, which now supplies roughly 8 percent of domestic energy, has also been growing. There is plenty of room for expansion for many renewable energy companies.The results of the presidential election have already bolstered the returns of these companies, too. While President Trump has promoted the use of fossil fuels like coal, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has advocated a $2 trillion climate plan to “achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.” His plan, not yet fully detailed, includes a variety of investment inducements and tax breaks.That would be more ambitious than the once-trendsetting 2045 goal of carbon-free energy production set by California. Already, solar power accounts for 18 percent of electricity generation at the utility Southern California Edison, said Erica Bowman, the company’s director of resource and environmental planning and strategy.Garvin Jabusch, chief investment officer for Green Alpha Advisors, an alternative energy investor, notes that the cost of generating electricity from solar energy is 90 percent lower than 10 years ago. Mr. Jabusch expects alternative energy prices to decline further with expanded demand. Mr. Jabusch favors companies that are “growing production capacity,” like First Solar, which has opened a new plant in Lake Township, Ohio, to expand production of its solar panels.For all its promise, investment in solar and wind power is limited by the laws of nature: Solar units can produce electricity only when the sun is shining, and wind turbines need wind.For the most part, Southern California Edison backs up its solar power with electricity generated by natural gas. But the utility recently contracted for nearly 600 megawatts of lithium ion battery storage so it can store excess electricity produced under ideal weather conditions.“Battery prices are down 90 percent over the last five to eight years,” Ms. Bowman said. “As we transition to a cleaner grid, solar generation coupled with battery storage is the cost-effective solution for California,” she added.Hydrogen fuel cells, which produce electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen, have emerged as a possible near-term solution for use in trucking and shipping, says Mr. Bloom. But such applications will require a costly expansion of the hydrogen gas filling station network, said Steve Capanna, director of U.S. climate policy and analysis for the Environmental Defense Fund. Right now, he said, beyond “a handful in California,” there aren’t many such stations.Buying shares of renewable energy stocks now requires a degree of faith, because they are so expensive, partly because of the low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve, which have helped to drive the overall stock market higher. Fed support may be the biggest reason the market has withstood all the grim economic news of the coronavirus to continue its seemingly unending valuation advance.Paul Coster, a JPMorgan analyst, said that the high prices in the renewables sector are based on solid achievement. “It’s not like the dot-com era,” he said. “These are real actors with real technology.” He added, “We’re living in this wonderful moment in time when virtue and self-interest coincide.”Perhaps, Mr. Coster mused, there are still good reasons to own some of these stocks. He cited FuelCell Energy, which has negative cash flow and has consistently reported quarterly earnings losses. Mr. Coster said investors may want to project out several years.By 2025, he said, it’s “feasible” that FuelCell Energy would have $60 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, justifying a rich, growth stock valuation. Even so, the company’s shares more than doubled in the last month, and on Jan. 14, Mr. Coster warned that at current prices, the stock was already “richly valued.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More