Monthly Archives: October 2014

“Virginia Climate Fever” shows us where we’re going, and why we don’t want to go there

by

The mid-Atlantic enjoyed one of the most delightful summers in memory this year, causing a lot of snickering to the effect that if climate change means moderate temperatures and low humidity, then bring it on, baby! Elsewhere on the planet, though, “bringing it on” translated into a whole lot of hot. For a good laugh at our own parochial mindset, check out the map of relative temperatures that accompanies this article about NOAA declaring 2014 on track to be the hottest year on record.

This sad reality check shows that global warming has not paused or gone away, and Virginians had better try to understand what’s coming so we can start preparing. It turns out our problems go well beyond sea level rise, as we learn this week from guest blogger Seth Heald.

Oh, and don’t miss the note at the bottom about the November 6 event. 

Featured imageVirginia climate activists (and indeed all Virginians) should cheer Stephen Nash, whose Virginia Climate Fever (just published by The University of Virginia Press) lays out clearly the costs of our decades of inaction on global warming. The book’s subtitle nicely sums up the point: How Global Warming Will Transform Our Cities, Shorelines, and Forests.

Why a climate book focused on just one state?

One of many confounding challenges of global warming is how to get people (and politicians and businesses) to take action commensurate with the size of the problem. As the popular British social scientist Roman Krznaric asks, “how can we close the gap between knowledge and action on climate change?” Krznarik’s answer is to seek ways to increase our empathy for people who live in distant places, or will live in future times. Certainly that is needed. (The U.S. edition of Krznarik’s book on empathy comes out in November.)

But since the day of increased empathy has yet to arrive, climate communications experts have focused on the need to get people to realize that climate change is happening here and now. It’s not just about our grandchildren, or even our children. It’s about us too. Now. And it’s not just about poor people living at sea level in Bangladesh, or the soon-to-disappear Maldives, or where melting glaciers threaten tens of millions of people’s water supply. Global warming is happening to us in America, and right here in Virginia. What’s more, it’s not limited to low-lying, frequently flooded parts of coastal Virginia, like Norfolk. Climate disruption is happening all across the commonwealth—from the shore to the tidal Potomac near Alexandria and Washington to the Piedmont to the mountains.

Climate communications experts agree that people are more likely to act (and demand that their leaders act) on global warming if they understand that it will have serious effects in their lives, and where they live.

Virginia Climate Fever does a superb job of bringing climate change home to Virginia. Nash, a journalist who writes with a deft touch, has taught at The University of Richmond since 1980, and he clearly knows Virginia well. He is is well versed in the science of climate disruption, and very good at explaining it. The book is filled with information gathered from interviews with scientists, including several at Virginia universities.

One leading climatologist featured prominently is Katharine Hayhoe, head of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. As the book explains, she also happens to be an evangelical Christian whose faith informs and inspires her work. At Nash’s request, Hayhoe and a colleague prepared color maps of Virginia for Virginia Climate Fever, showing stunningly how much hotter our summers and winters are likely to be in the coming decades under different levels of future carbon emissions. It’s hard for me (at age 61) to look at these and contemplate my own hotter future here, much less my children’s.

Most disturbing to my mind was Nash’s description of the future of what those maps mean for our forests. We often hear about sea-level rise and how it will combine with more-severe storms to harm Virginia, especially in the Hampton Roads area. And well we should—the situation in Virginia’s coastal areas is dire indeed. But Nash reveals that our inland and mountain forests are just as threatened. And so not surprisingly are many plant and animal species that live in or near them. Many species face the prospect of extinction this century. Nash quotes the bioclimatologist Ron Neilson as saying that large areas of Virginia forest could “go into drought stress and potentially burn up,” resulting in “some very rapid conversions from forest to savannah.” Nash asked Neilson if this could happen in the next twenty or thirty years. Neilson’s answer: “How about now?”

Virginia Climate Fever is not strictly speaking a book about energy or energy policy. Rather it’s about climate impacts from our past, present, and future energy choices. But for those on the more well-informed side of the current “I’m not a scientist, what do I know?” climate-science-denial catchphrase, Virginia’s current and future energy choices will come to mind on every page of the book.

Nash does include a chapter on possible prescriptions for our climate fever. He tellingly notes: “we don’t lack for examples among other states,” citing North Carolina and Maryland as two of many states considerably farther along in addressing changing climate. He cites with approval Maryland’s efficiency and conservation measures, and its mandatory renewable portfolio standard, noting that Virginia is one of only nineteen states with no mandatory renewable standard at all. He mentions Maryland’s participation in the multistate Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Again, “Virginia is not on the list.”

Nash asked Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality about climate change and got this written response: “The Virginia [DEQ] does not have the expertise to study climate change issues.” One could not find a better sentence to sum up the four lost years of the McDonell-Cuccinelli administration’s climate denialism.

Governor Terry McAuliffe and Senator Mark Warner enthuse about a mindless “all of the above” energy policy that includes fracking (and associated pipelines), offshore oil drilling, coal exports, and ever more reliance on fossil fuels. (To his credit, Senator Tim Kaine has said that “all of the above” is not a strategy—yet nevertheless supports offshore oil drilling.) Virginia Climate Fever is a wake-up call for them, and for the “I’m not a scientist” crowd, and for all Virginians.

But of course there have been other such calls in the past few decades. The question is, when will enough Virginians hear them clearly, and begin to act with a sense of urgency?

Seth Heald is vice chair of the Sierra Club Virginia Chapter. He is a student in the Master of Science in Energy Policy and Climate program at Johns Hopkins University.

Note: Northern Virginians will have an opportunity on November 6 to meet Stephen Nash in Alexandria at an author talk and book signing. Details and RSVP form are here.

 

Virginia’s SCC staff attacks EPA over the Clean Power Plan

by
Virginians rally in front of U.S. EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC in support of the Clean Power Plan

Virginians rally in front of U.S. EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC in support of the Clean Power Plan

In recent years paleontologists have come to believe that the dinosaurs did not go extinct; they evolved into today’s chickens and other birds. It turns out, however, that some of them did not evolve. Instead, they took jobs at Virginia’s State Corporation Commission.

Now they’ve put their DNA on full display with comments they filed on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. The proposed EPA rules, under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act, would require states to reduce the power plant CO2 emissions driving climate change. The staffers assert primly that they “take no position on the broad policy issues,” but that they feel “compelled” to point out all the ways the plan is “arbitrary, capricious, unsupported, and unlawful.” These mostly boil down to their claims that the plan will force coal plant closures, raise rates significantly and threaten service reliability—claims experts say are badly off-base.

Note that the commissioners themselves didn’t sign onto these comments. They come from the career staff at the Energy Regulatory Division, led by Bill Stevens, the Director, and Bill Chambliss, the General Counsel. This is pretty peculiar. I can’t think of a single other agency of government where the staff would file comments on a federal rulemaking without the oversight of their bosses.

Bill and Bill acknowledge in a footnote that the staff comments represent only their own views and not those of the commissioners. But that distinction has already been lost on at least one lawmaker. Today Speaker of the House William J. Howell released a statement declaring, “The independent, nonpartisan analysis of the State Corporation Commission confirms that President Obama’s environmental policies could devastate Virginia’s economy.”

And really, “devastate”? But that’s the kind of hysteria you hear from opponents of the Clean Power Plan. While the rest of us see healthier air, huge opportunities for job growth in the clean energy sector, and the chance to avoid the worst effects of climate disruption, the Friends of Coal see only devastation. And no wonder: Howell accepted $14,000 from the coal industry just this year alone.

But back to what the Bills over at the SCC think about the Clean Power Plan. How did they arrive at their conclusion that it would raise rates? According to Cale Jaffe, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center who practices extensively before the SCC, “Staff never did an analysis of an actual plan to comply with the Clean Power Plan, which has a lot of flexibility built into it. Instead, the Staff simply took Dominion Virginia Power’s last Integrated Resource Plan from 2013 and used it as a proxy for a compliance plan. That’s a significant flaw that skews the Staff’s analysis.  The Dominion plan, after all, was released nearly a year before the EPA even announced its rule.”

Compounding the error, says Jaffe, the staff “artificially inflated the cost by assuming that the only compliance strategy would be for Dominion to build a new nuclear reactor: the most expensive resource, which is not a required compliance option.”

We can all agree with the staff that nuclear plants are appallingly expensive. That may be why the EPA doesn’t assume most states will build them as part of their compliance strategy. To the contrary, the expectation is that states will respond with energy efficiency, wind and solar—all resources that are plentiful in Virginia but largely untapped so far.

As Jaffe notes, “an independent analysis of the actual Clean Power Plan itself shows that Virginia can achieve its goals at a fraction of the cost while lowering Virginians’ bills by 8%.”

We have seen time and again that the SCC staff has never been friendly to either renewable energy or energy efficiency, so it’s no surprise that their comments dismiss them as unworkable. Indeed, it is clear from the comments they filed that their real interest is promoting an anti-EPA, pro-coal agenda. Otherwise it would be hard to understand why they would stray so far from their own area of practice to attack the very legality of the Clean Power Plan.

Jaffe lists a number of other ways the SCC staff screwed up, but you get the picture: careful, reasoned analysis wasn’t the point. Still, you’d think that if agency staffers decide to go rogue like this, they would be careful to get the facts right.

———————————

Update: I have heard from some sources that the SCC staff had the blessing of at least one commissioner in putting forth their comments, and that all three commissioners may have known. If so, that’s even worse.

McAuliffe’s Energy Plan has a little something for (almost) everyone

by

On October 1, the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy released the McAuliffe administration’s rewrite of the Virginia Energy Plan. Tomorrow, on October 14, Governor McAuliffe is scheduled to speak about the plan at an “executive briefing” to be held at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond. Will he talk most about fossil fuels, or clean energy? Chances are, we’ll hear a lot about both.

Like the versions written by previous governors, McAuliffe’s plan boasts of an “all of the above” approach. But don’t let that put you off. In spite of major lapses of the drill-baby-drill variety, this plan has more about solar energy, offshore wind, and energy efficiency, and less about coal, than we are used to seeing from a Virginia governor.

Keep in mind that although the Virginia Code requires an energy plan rewrite every four years, the plan does not have the force of law. It is intended to lay out principles, to be the governor’s platform and a basis for action, not the action itself. This is why they tend to look like such a hodge-podge: it’s just so easy to promise every constituency what it wants. The fights come in the General Assembly, when the various interests look for follow-through.

Here’s my take on some of the major recommendations: IMG_3954

Renewable energy. Advocates and energy libertarians will like the barrier-busting approach called for in the Energy Plan, including raising the cap on customer-owned solar and other renewables from the current 1% of a utility’s peak load to 3%; allowing neighborhoods and office parks to develop and share renewable energy projects; allowing third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs) statewide and doubling both the size of projects allowed and the overall program limit; and increasing the size limits on both residential (to 40 kW) and commercial (to 1 MW) net metered projects, with standby charges allowed only for projects over 20 kW (up from the current 10 kW for residential, but seemingly now to be applied to all systems).

It also proposes a program that would allow utilities to build off-site solar facilities on behalf of subscribers and provide on-bill financing to pay for it. This sounds rather like a true green power program, but here the customers would pay to build and own the project instead of simply buying electricity from renewable energy projects.

Elsewhere in the recommendations, the plan calls for “flexible financing mechanisms” that would support both energy projects and energy efficiency.

In case unleashing the power of customers doesn’t do enough for solar, the plan also calls for the establishment of a Virginia Solar Energy Development Authority tasked with the development of 15 megawatts (MW) of solar energy at state and local government facilities by June 30, 2017, and another 15 MW of private sector solar by the same date. Though extremely modest by the standards of Maryland and North Carolina, these goals, if met, would about triple Virginia’s current total. I do like the fact that these are near-term goals designed to boost the industry quickly. But let’s face it: these drops don’t even wet the bucket. We need gigawatts of solar over the next few decades, so let’s set some serious long-term goals for this Authority, and give it the tools to achieve them.

Finally, the plan reiterates the governor’s enthusiasm for building offshore wind, using lots of exciting words (“full,” “swift,” “with vigor”), but neglecting how to make it happen. Offshore wind is this governor’s Big Idea. I’d have expected more of a plan.

And while we’re in “I’d have expected more” territory, you have to wonder whatever happened to the mandatory Renewable Portfolio Standard that McAuliffe championed when running for office. Maybe our RPS is too hopeless even for a hopeless optimist.

Energy Efficiency. Reducing energy consumption and saving money for consumers and government are no-brainer concepts that have led to ratepayers in many other states paying lower electricity bills than we do, even in the face of higher rates. Everyone can get behind energy efficiency, with the exception of utilities that make money selling more electricity. (Oh, wait—those would be our utilities.) The Energy Plan calls for establishing a Virginia Board on Energy Efficiency, tasked with getting us to the state’s goal of 10% savings two years ahead of schedule. But glaringly absent is any mention of the role of building codes. Recall that Governor McDonnell bowed to the home builders and allowed a weakened version of the residential building code to take effect. So far Governor McAuliffe hasn’t reversed that decision. If he is serious about energy efficiency, this is an obvious, easy step. Where is it?

Fracking_Site_in_Warren_Center,_PA_04

Natural Gas. Did I say offshore wind was the governor’s Big Idea? Well, now he’s got a bigger one: that 500-mile long natural gas pipeline Dominion wants to build from West Virginia through the middle of Virginia and down to North Carolina. Governor McAuliffe gets starry-eyed talking about fracked gas powering a new industrial age in Virginia. So it’s not surprising that the Energy Plan includes support for gas pipelines among other infrastructure projects. As for fracking itself, though, the recommendations have nothing to say. A curious omission, surely? And while we are on the subject of natural gas, this plan is a real testament to the lobbying prowess of the folks pushing for natural gas vehicles. Given how little appetite the public has shown for this niche market, it’s remarkable to see more than a page of recommendations for subsidies and mandates. Some of these would apply to electric vehicles as well. But if we really want to reduce energy use in transportation, shouldn’t we give people more alternatives to vehicles? It’s too bad sidewalks, bicycles and mass transit (however fueled) get no mention in the plan.

Photo credit Ed Brown, Wikimedia Commons.

Coal. Coal has fallen on hard times, indeed, when even Virginia’s energy plan makes no recommendations involving it. Oh, there’s a whole section about creating export markets for coal technology, as in, helping people who currently sell equipment to American coal companies find a living in other ways. These might be Chinese coal mining companies; but then again, they might be companies that mine metals in Eastern Europe, or build tunnels, or do something totally different. The Energy Plan seems to be saying that coal may be on its way out, but there’s no reason it should drag the whole supply chain down with it. Good thinking.

Nuclear. If you think the coal industry has taken a beating these past few years, consider nuclear. Nationwide, the few new projects that haven’t been canceled are behind schedule and over budget, going forward at all only thanks to the liberality of Uncle Sam and the gullibility of state lawmakers. But there it is in the Energy Plan: we’re going to be “a national and global leader in nuclear energy.” Watch your wallets, people. Dominion already raided them for $300 million worth of development costs for a third plant at North Anna. That was just a down payment.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

Offshore drilling. As with nuclear, favoring offshore oil drilling seems to be some kind of perverse obsession for many Virginia politicians. Sure enough, the energy plan says we should “fully support” it. As for the downside potential for a massive spill of crude oil fouling beaches, ruining fishing grounds, destroying the coastal tourism economy, and killing vast numbers of marine animals, the plan says we must be prepared “to provide a timely and comprehensive response.” I bet Louisiana was at least equally prepared.

Utilities’ pullout won’t affect “value of solar” study

by

When Virginia’s utilities made a surprise announcement on September 5th that they would no longer participate in the state’s Solar Stakeholder Group (SSG), they may have hoped that doing so would stop the group’s Value of Solar study in its tracks. Not so: on Friday, at its first meeting since the utilities withdrew, the group agreed it would issue the report on schedule, although with no further input from members—thus guaranteeing that the report reflects only input submitted while the utilities participated.

This decision was essentially a moot point, because the group had actually wrapped up its work by that September 5th date in order to give the study authors time to incorporate comments, including those from the utilities. The resulting third draft of the report was provided to the remaining group members on September 29. It reflects the work of the full 49-member committee up to September 4.

Lead authors Damian Pitt and Gilbert Michaud of Virginia Commonwealth University will do some clean-up editing and draft a cover letter. Then, in accordance with the work plan established last summer, it will be submitted to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for review. The study is due in to the Senate Rules Committee by November 1. But as noted previously by Jim Pierobon, it’s not clear how much weight the study will have in the General Assembly now that the utilities have disavowed it.

The utilities have not said why they decided to withdraw from participation. They wrote no memos, offered no analysis, and sent no polite email to other members expressing regret or anything else.

The SSG grew out of an informal “Small Solar Working Group” that formed in 2013 as a way to bring together those with an interest in non-utility-scale solar.* Like the SSG, the Working Group included representatives from the solar industry, environmental groups, local government, academia, trade associations and the electric utilities. But while the Working Group set its own broad agenda, the SSG was formed in response to a specific letter request from the Clerk of the Virginia Senate to DEQ and DMME. The letter asked for a study of “the costs and benefits of distributed solar generation and net metering.”

From that description, and knowing that the utilities hastily decamped, you might think that the SSG actually calculated costs and benefits and came up with a value of solar, and that the result was good for solar advocates but bad for utilities. But in fact, the study reaches no conclusions at all. It could more accurately be described as a study about how you would conduct a study, were you so inclined. Which no one was, because then the utilities might have left. As they did, but only after ensuring the study incorporates their views.

Thus the study wraps up with statements like, “The SSG recognizes that the short- and long-term value of solar will be dependent on a wide range of conditions and perspectives.” And this: “With greater time, resource, and data access, future studies could produce actual values for the net VOS under each methodology.”

There is nothing wrong with such a limited approach, so far as it goes. Professors Pitt and Michaud did an excellent and comprehensive job in surveying the literature, comparing previous studies, and discussing the factors relevant to the issue of solar’s value to the grid, utilities, customers, and society at large. But given that this Value of Solar study came nowhere near assigning a value of solar, it’s hard to understand what the utilities might have objected to.

Nor had there been any hints the utilities were unhappy with the process or with the first two drafts of the report. At Friday’s SSG meeting, many of the other members expressed their surprise and frustration with the utilities’ pull-out. They noted that the utilities participated fully every step of the way and provided copious comments, which were reflected in the drafts. Indeed, three utility representatives served on the twelve-member steering committee that created the work plan and oversaw the study, making it as much their work as anyone else’s. (The other steering committee members were Professor Pitt, three representatives of local government, two conservation group reps., two solar industry members, and one citizen representative.)

So why did the utilities pull out? In retrospect, it may have been their plan all along. By pulling out, they could signal to their allies their disapproval of the study and try to prevent a follow-on study that would actually calculate a value for solar. And by waiting until the last moment to pull out, they maximized their influence over the study’s content, lest it have credence outside their sphere of influence.

But what the utilities lost by this clever maneuver is the trust of the rest of the group. The SSG, like the Small Solar Working Group before it, provided a forum for discussion among the many different parties with an interest in distributed solar. It is incredibly important in a forum like the SSG that people trust each other to act in good faith. Otherwise, 49 people are wasting their time.

The utilities’ decision to sacrifice this trust strikes me as both stupid and unnecessary. Many of us expected that the utilities’ lobbyists would quietly tell their friends in the legislature to ignore the Value of Solar study, that they participated just to be nice guys. Openly thumbing their noses at the study did nothing except prove they aren’t nice guys and cannot be trusted.

The rural electric cooperatives will have to answer to their members, who admittedly don’t seem to pay much attention. But Dominion Virginia Power and Appalachian Power are public utilities. They hold their monopolies by the grace of the people of Virginia, and are expected to act in the interest of the people they serve. In this case, they have manifestly failed to do so.

——————

* I was one of the founding members of the Small Solar Working Group and was responsible for asking the Department of Environmental Quality’s Carol Wampler to facilitate the meetings. Ms. Wampler had led other successful stakeholder groups and had a gift for guiding people with disparate interests towards consensus. (Unfortunately for the people of Virginia, she retired from DEQ this summer.) She brought in the equally-dedicated Ken Jurman from the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy as a co-facilitator. The divide between the utility monopolies and everyone else proved too great to produce any consensus bills that could spur the flourishing of solar in Virginia, but it did develop a level of trust, unfortunately now compromised.