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MARKEY’S PERMITTING REFORM PROPOSAL: Sen. Ed Markey is staking out progressives’ position on how Congress should go about speeding up environmental permitting with new suggestions that would explicitly exclude fossil fuel projects from special project designations and enable local communities to be included in project planning itself.
The Massachusetts Democrat’s suggestions represent a sharp contrast to the fossil fuel-centric H.R. 1 Republicans are advancing and to Sen. Joe Manchin’s “all-of-the-above”-type reform bill that failed in December.
The policy outline is also in many ways to the left of the transmission and “environmental justice”-centric permitting measures Democrats in the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition put on the table in November, the first sort of counter-proposal to Manchin’s bill from more liberal members, and it illustrates just how far apart members are as they seek out a consensus on reform at President Joe Biden’s request.
What’s in it: Markey, one of the handful of Senate Democrats who joined most of the Republican conference in opposing Manchin’s legislation at the end of the last Congress, introduced his broad set of ideas, some of which already have a form in current legislation, to a crowd at the liberal Roosevelt Institute yesterday.
His list of “progressive clean energy deployment and permitting priorities” call for foregrounding environmental justice considerations and enabling more community input earlier on in the project review process.
It proposes to establish an intervener funding program through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Office of Public Participation to facilitate that. The idea is basically to fund attorneys to help members of the public digest and intervene in FERC orders approving projects.
Project developers have “all funding in the world” to participate and engage with FERC but environmental justice advocates and other members of the public have limited resources, one Democratic aide said, explaining the motivation behind the idea.
It’s not a new idea in the permitting reform conversation. The House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition included an intervener fund in its November permitting policy brief.
Markey goes further on environmental justice, though, and proposes to include affected communities in the project planning process rather than just leaving them equipped to comment or challenge a project after it’s been planned and proposed.
Implementing those changes would facilitate more community support for projects and “minimize the likelihood of protracted litigation,” according to a summary from Markey’s office.
Compare that with Manchin’s legislative proposals, which sought to minimize the likelihood of protracted litigation at first by putting a statute of limitations on court challenges. His amended bill dialed that back but sought to direct courts to expedite consideration of claims (Republicans’ Lower Energy Costs Act would also establish new limits on legal claims against some categories of projects).
Markey also proposed designating 25 zero-emission energy generation projects as projects of “strategic national importance,” directly riffing off of Manchin’s idea for presidentially declared projects of importance.
Markey, however, would exclude oil, gas, fossil hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage projects from the list and require that at least 50% of such projects be “clean energy projects that support environmental justice communities.”
Big theme: There’s no place for fossil fuels in Markey’s list, the resource that Republicans want to exploit with their energy legislation. Manchin’s legislation was less directly focused on oil and gas-related permitting reforms than Republicans’ H.R. 1, but it did seek to push the Mountain Valley Pipeline through, turning many Democrats off.
“There were provisions in the Manchin package that were too far for many Democrats to truly swallow, Mountain Valley Pipeline automatic approval being the top of that list,” the same House Democratic aide told Jeremy, saying the biggest priority for the conference overall would be transmission.
Dozens of Senate Democrats, including liberal members like Sheldon Whitehouse and Ron Wyden, backed Manchin’s bill anyway, but the legislative dynamics have shifted again with the new Congress, the aide said.
“The balance that is needed now, since we have to do this in a bipartisan way, is figuring out what on the other side of the ledger that Republicans are pushing is palatable [to enough Democrats],” the person said. “I don’t think we have an answer to that yet.”
Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner Energy and Environment Writers Jeremy Beaman (@jeremywbeaman) and Breanne Deppisch (@breanne_dep). Email [email protected] or [email protected] for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.
MIDWESTERN GOVERNORS ASK EPA TO RELAX SUMMER E15 RULES: Governors in four midwestern states asked Administrator Michael Regan to take action for a second straight summer to enable expanded use of E15 gasoline.
The governors, led by Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, requested that Regan apply the same summertime volatility limitations to both E10 and E15 during 2023. E10 currently enjoys a lasting waiver from those limitations (unless governors are approved to remove it, as discussed below) whereas E15 must be granted one.
Consumers, fuel retailers, ethanol producers, and farmers “need certainty,” the governors said in a letter and said the fuel market conditions “still exist today” that drove the Biden administration to issue an emergency waiver for E15 last summer when oil prices surged following the invasion of Ukraine.
Why intervention: Midwestern states have expressed disappointment that EPA’s decision earlier this month to grant a request by eight states to equalize volatility regulations between E10 and E15 by removing E10’s waiver would not be made effective until next summer.
That leaves consumers and industry without the expanded E15 option this year, ethanol interests have argued.
Iowa and Nebraska threatened to sue the Biden administration over the summer 2024 effective date, saying EPA failed to meet statutory deadlines in responding to the states’ petition to remove the E10 waiver.
RENEWABLE ENERGY ACCOUNTED FOR 83% OF NEW POWER CAPACITY ADDED LAST YEAR: Global renewable energy capacity increased by 9.6% in 2022, accounting for roughly 83% of power capacity added, the International Renewable Energy Agency said in its annual report yesterday, as more countries sought to diversify their energy mixes and reduce fossil fuel reliance.
Solar and wind additions continued to dominate the sector, accounting for a combined 90% of all new renewable generation capacity added in 2022. By the end of the year, renewable capacity alone amounted to 3,372 gigawatts — or a 295 GW increase from the previous year.
But to meet the 2015 Paris climate accord targets, IRENA said, annual additions of renewable power capacity must increase by three times the 2022 growth rate by 2030. The UN said this week that the world must halve its fossil fuel emissions by the mid-2030s to avoid surpassing that threshold.
SHELL NORTH AMERICA LEADER SAYS INDUSTRY IS UNDERGOING ‘SEISMIC SHIFT’: The president of Shell North America said yesterday that the energy industry is undergoing a “seismic shift” as companies seek to balance the need for clean energy technologies with problems of reliability and increasing demand.
In the more than 100 years since Shell has been in the energy business, the company has undergone a “number” of transitions, Carolyn Comer said yesterday at the EPSA Competitive Power Summit, but the one now is “probably going to happen quicker than anything that we’ve seen in the past.”
In order to meet the growing demand in the U.S. she cited the need to increase the speed of permitting for energy transmission and distribution infrastructure as “absolutely critical.”
She also pointed to the massive market interventions that some countries, including in the EU, have taken to help consumers avoid record-high energy costs caused by the war in Ukraine.
These interventions “have really turned investment markets on their heads,” she said. It’s that type of uncertainty, she said, that actually caused some to rethink their investments in some countries—to either “pull back their funds or even divert their capital elsewhere, like to the U.S.”
On the clean energy side, Comer said she was excited about the prospects for things like renewable natural gas and responsibly sourced gas, including processes that would allow the removal of methane from natural gas.
Still, she warned, energy transition “is not an on-off switch” and must be done thoughtfully and over time.
POWER GRIDS DOMINATED BY RELIABILITY PROBLEMS: NERC CEO and President Jim Robb said yesterday that reliability problems for U.S. power grids are continuing to increase due to to an increasingly diverse resource mix, retirements of traditional power generation sources, and an increase in extreme weather events across the country.
“All of these factors bring [in an added] level of complexity,” Robb said yesterday.
NERC is using four main areas to focus its work and mitigate the risk to power grids both from a reliability and security perspective.
Among them are monitoring and ensuring the overarching resource of exchanges, dealing with extreme weather, and getting a handle around fuel supply and the sector’s ability to supply consumers 24/7.
Another is security. Robb noted that over the past few months, grids have seen a “number of high-profile ransomware events,” which outpaced recent physical threats. This offers a great opportunity for the sector, he said, as they are “basically developing a grid in front of us and have an opportunity to build cybersecurity into the grid—as opposed to bolt it on afterwards—which is basically what we’re doing today.”
Another key point: Robb said updated resource modeling for current weather conditions is key. Current reserve margins are “no longer sufficient” for predicting reliability or ability to serve consumers in the event of protracted, extreme weather events such as Winter Storm Uri, or drought and extreme heat events that plagued California and raised reliability concerns as recently as last summer.
In the near term, batteries will not be “nearly enough” to supply grids in extreme weather events during the transition to renewables, he said, and he encouraged grid operators across the U.S. to convene and develop a cohesive strategy to respond and secure short-term fuel supply to keep its grid online in the event of a weather emergency.
DEVELOPERS SCOPE WORLD’S LARGEST FLOATING WIND PROJECT: A consortium of wind developers and financiers finished scoping for Ossian, the largest floating wind project under development and planned for the North Sea, and submitted its report to Scottish regulators.
The project is being developed by SSE Renewables-Marubeni-CIP, made up of Scottish developer SSE Renewables, Japanese conglomerate Marubeni Corporation, and Danish fund management company Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
The project, expected to come online in the early 2030s, would total 3.6 gigawatts and consist of 270 turbines and up to six offshore substation platforms. For comparison, Vineyard Wind, the United States’s first commercial-scale offshore wind project planned to come online this year offshore Massachusetts, totals less than 1 GW.
Floating wind remains an emerging technology and only constitutes around 150 megawatts worth of offshore wind capacity globally.
The Biden administration held its first deepwater offshore wind lease sale for floating wind last year off the California coast.
EV MODELS ON THE MARKET DOUBLED BETWEEN MY 2021 & 2022: The number of light-duty all-electric vehicles on the market nearly doubled between model year 2021 and 2022, according to data circulated by the Department of Energy this week.
Consumers in MY 2021 had 20 all-electric models to choose from. The number of all-electric models increased to 38 in MY 2022.
The Rundown
Bloomberg Trudeau set to pick a lane in clean-tech race against Biden
Calendar
THURSDAY | MARCH 23
10:00 a.m. Dirksen 366. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will convene for a hearing to examine cybersecurity vulnerabilities to U.S. energy infrastructure.
