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LARGEST UTILITY IN NATION GEARS UP FOR WAR WITH HURRICANE: The North Carolina-based Duke Energy has mobilized an army of utility workers to fight back against Hurricane Florence, with 1 to 3 million people expected to lose power, potentially for weeks.

Thousands on the ground, ready to ‘attack’: “More than 20,000 people will be in place to attack restoration as soon as it’s safe to do so,” the utility giant tweeted Wednesday night. An additional 1,200 line workers, contractors and related support personnel from Florida are expected to join the thousands of others coming from Duke affiliates and other utilities in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky to prepare for what could be nothing short of a military campaign with Mother Nature.

Storm is ‘beyond’ previous hurricanes: “The magnitude of the storm is beyond what we have seen in years,” said Howard Fowler, the company’s incident commander, in a statement. “With the storm expected to linger, power restoration work could take weeks instead of days.”

EPA’S WHEELER SHOWS HE’S SERIOUS ABOUT THE HURRICANE: Environmental Protection Agency acting chief Andrew Wheeler ramped up his emergency operations center to coordinate the Trump administration’s environmental response in the wake of the unprecedented storm.

“EPA staff are on the ground in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia evaluating Superfund sites and helping staff emergency operations centers,” the agency said.

The Superfund sites contain hazardous waste that could be released with the flooding that is expected from the storm.  

Watching out for hazardous spills: EPA is coordinating with the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “in anticipation of a potential hazardous debris mission assignment,” the agency said. “EPA is preparing needed resources to address releases of hazardous materials and oil, if requested, including flooding impacts to hazardous sites.” 

Policy advisers assembled: Wheeler also convened the agency’s Policy Coordinating Committee at emergency response center.  

Ready to aid Washington: EPA Region 3 Administrator Cosmo Servidio also contacted Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to discuss needs for EPA support. ”No support has been requested” as of yet, the agency said.

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WHEELER EXTENDS FUEL WAIVERS TO VIRGINIA AND GEORGIA: EPA’s Andrew Wheeler granted waivers in Georgia and Virginia on Wednesday night to ease the flow of gasoline through the states as the hurricane approaches.

“Voluntary and mandatory evacuations compound these extreme and unusual fuel supply circumstances,” the agency announced. “EPA has granted a temporary waiver to help ensure that an adequate supply of gasoline is available in the affected areas until normal supply to the region can be restored.”

The waiver removes strict fuel blending requirements that are required to control the creation of ozone and other pollutants to expedite fuel to where it is required sooner.  

HOUSE COMMITTEE PASSES BILL TO FIX CRUMBLING NATIONAL PARKS: The House Natural Resources Committee on Thursday morning passed a bipartisan compromise bill to pay for billions of dollars of repairs and maintenance in national parks.

The bill, which moves now to the House floor, would pay for repairs with money the government collects from the development of oil, natural gas, wind, and solar energy on public lands.

National parks unite usual foes: It was co-sponsored by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah and top Democrat, Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona. The two usually spar on public lands issues, but agreed to a compromise that is similar to a Trump administration proposal to fund the Interior Department’s $16 billion maintenance backlog.

“Our parks are national treasures,” Bishop said Thursday. “Let’s start treating them that way.”

Of the $16 billion backlog, the National Park Service has the largest repair need — $11.6 billion in 2017 for the nation’s 417 national park sites.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke supports the bill, and cheered the House committee for passing it.

“Great bipartisan work in the House @NatResources today to #RebuildOurParks,” Zinke said in a Twitter post. “Looking forward to working with @lisamurkowski and @EnergyGOP @EnergyDems to keep this historic @NatlParkService #infrastructure plan moving forward.”

What the bill does: The bill would create a pot of money for repairs and maintenance projects, dubbed the National Park Service and Public Lands Legacy Restoration Fund, providing $1.3 billion a year for five years, for a total of $6.5 billion.

To win the backing of Grijalva and other Democrats, the bill only uses unallocated energy revenue that is already due to the federal government from leasing on public lands, not new revenues from anticipated future leases.

Debate over spending: Some conservatives complained Thursday that the bill would mandate more spending.

“Allocating more mandatory spending seems irresponsible,” said Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.

Bishop, however, argued the spending is not technically mandatory, because it uses excess revenues from energy leasing already collected by the federal government, and specifically sets it aside to address the maintenance backlog on public lands.

“This is mandatory, kind of,” Bishop said. “If the money is not there, it won’t be appropriated. If it is, it won’t be in the general fund to expand government… which for my conservative friends, that’s the goal.”

SCOTT PRUITT IS BACK AND DEMOCRATS WANT HIM HELD TO ACCOUNT: Sen. Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, wants former EPA chief Scott Pruitt held to account after the agency released his financial disclosure report for 2017.

Just to recap: Pruitt resigned on July 5 amid months of scandals and ethics probes by EPA’s inspector general.

Carper put it this way: “For the better part of two years, the public was inundated with story after story about how Scott Pruitt used his position to advance his own career and personal well-being,” the senator said in a joint statement with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.  

A spring request answered in fall: The senators had been prodding EPA for months to release the financial disclosure report. They pointed out that is was released on September 12 after multiple requests by the senators for information about Pruitt’s disclosure which was originally due on May 15.

‘Good’ that he’s ‘gone’: “It’s good that Scott Pruitt is finally gone, but that doesn’t mean we’re simply going to forget about his blatant misuse of his position and of taxpayer dollars,” the senators said. “The American people want and deserve a refund.”

What’s in the disclosure: In the disclosure report, Pruitt said he accepted no gifts from outside parties, despite reports that he was given basketball tickets by a coal executive. Pruitt was most noted for his excessive travel spending and used of taxpayer funds for security, including a private detachment of guards that oversaw a personal vacation to Disneyland.

PRUITT’S JOB SEARCH TURNS UP COAL CONSULTING GIG: Meanwhile, Pruitt is reportedly looking to go to work for Kentucky coal tycoon Joseph W. Craft III.

The New York Times was the first to report Pruitt’s job search to become a coal consultant after resigning from his post at EPA in July amid a number of ethics probes and scandals.

Craft is chief executive of Alliance Resource Partners and a major donor to the Republican Party, who also enjoyed a close relationship with the EPA during Pruitt’s tenure. Craft had met with Pruitt several times during his first year as EPA administrator, the newspaper said, according to two anonymous industry officials.

SOLAR INDUSTRY SET TO BOUNCE BACK FROM TRUMP TARIFFS: The solar industry announced Thursday that it’s back on track after surviving President Trump’s tariffs on imported solar panels and other economic woes.

“The U.S. solar market has experienced a tumultuous few quarters since the government last year began considering tariffs on imported solar modules and cells, but data for the second quarter of 2018 show signs of a turnaround in the market,” said the Solar Energy Industries Association in releasing its second quarter economic report.

First, the bad news: “This is the first quarter where the data clearly show that tariffs took a bite out of the solar market,” the trade group said in releasing the financial report by GTM Research. It recalled that some previously-announced solar projects had been canceled, or delayed, due to the Trump administration’s tariffs.  

In the second quarter, the U.S. market installed 9 percent less solar panels than a year earlier, a 7 percent quarter-over-quarter decrease. This was despite the fact that the prices for solar modules had fallen sharply in the second quarter due to lower demand in China.

Ok, now the good news: Going forward, the report forecasts an solar projects accelerating in the second half of 2018 driven by bigger utility-scale solar arrays over residential solar panel installations.

“According to the report, 8.5 gigawatts of utility [solar panel] projects were procured in the first six months of the year, the most ever procured in that timeframe,” according to the trade group. “Some of these were on hold in 2017 due to uncertainty around the tariffs.”

BROWN GETS RUDE RECEPTION FROM THE LEFT AT CLIMATE SUMMIT: A coalition of environmental groups kicked off California Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate summit Thursday morning by holding a mass protest and calling him a hypocrite.

Oil and gas is the reason: The activists, representing over 800 health, social justice, environmental and consumer groups, gathered to protest what they say is Brown’s refusal to confront California’s oil and natural gas drilling and refining industry.

They are giving him one last chance: The push to pressure Brown to push oil out of the Golden State is called the Brown’s Last Chance campaign. It has been working for most of 2018 to “push Brown to halt the development of all new dirty fuel projects in California,” including “a plan to phase out all fossil fuel extraction and processing as quickly as possible and provide support and opportunities for those most impacted by the transition,” according to a statement.

Brown keeps ignoring them: “Because Gov. Brown has ignored these demands, demonstrators with the campaign will join forces with hundreds of other activists from the It Takes Roots coalition for a mass action to make sure the voice of the people is heard,” the campaign added.

THOUSANDS OF MINI-ELECTRIC GRIDS TO BE BUILT IN PUERTO RICO USING CHURCHES: A humanitarian effort founded by a German clean energy firm launched a first-of-a-kind project in Puerto Rico on Thursday, aiming to make the island’s energy grid impervious to hurricanes and hopefully get some buy-in from Washington.

“If this had existed a year ago, it would have been life-changing for Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria,” a project principal told the Washington Examiner in an interview previewing the announcement.

The beginning of humanitarian microgrids: The “Lighthouse Project,” as it is called, was initiated by the del Sol Foundation for Energy Security, which was founded by the U.S. branch of German clean energy firm Sonnen, Inc., to oversee the construction of “humanitarian microgrids” as part of a Puerto Rico relief effort initiated last year.

Thousands of projects: The plan is to link 3,000 places of worship, schools, hospitals, and other venues to a so-called microgrid, which is essentially a self-sustaining energy system that is more resilient than a conventional electric grid.

The effort will begin by deploying solar and battery storage at 500 churches, essentially turning the places of worships into power plants that can sustain the nearby communities where they reside.

By tying together enough of these microgrids, the hope is that Puerto Rico can bounce back faster if another storm like Hurricane Maria strikes the island again. The project developers say they expect to build out the first several hundred microgrids very quickly. Del Sol already has 12 proof-of-concept grid projects up and running.

PUERTO RICO ENERGY EFFORT TAPS BUSH’S FAITH-BASED LEGACY: Del Sol’s advisers hope to get some assistance from the Trump administration, although it is not clear if or when that will happen.

Former Bush official tapped: Henry Lozano, deputy assistant to former President George W. Bush, who serves as an adviser on the project, said Lighthouse would be impossible without the faith-based initiative offices set up under the Bush administration.

Faith-based offices provide boots on the ground: “In every municipality in Puerto Rico there is a faith-based office, so you actually have boots on the ground,” said Lozano in explaining how the project would be coordinated using those offices. “The time that it would have took to bring together a large group to try to figure out where this was going to go and how this was going to happen was going to be too complex.”

So far, only on the island: But those offices only speak for Puerto Rico, and not Washington or the Trump administration.

During the Bush administration, Pastor Anibal Heredia led the charge to implement the president’s faith-based directive in Puerto Rico by setting up offices and faith directorates within the government there.

Taking his message to Washington: Lozano is working to further coordinate that effort with the faith-based offices that still exist within every Cabinet-level agency in Washington, he said. Lozano has been in talks with the faith-based offices in Washington about joining in support of the Lighthouse Project, but it isn’t clear if the administration will join.

TRUMP BLAMES DEMOCRATS FOR INFLATING PUERTO RICO DEATH TOLL TO ‘MAKE ME LOOK BAD’: Trump said Thursday that 3,000 people did not die in Puerto Rico in the two hurricanes that hit the island last year, and claimed that Democrats were inflating the number in an effort to make him look bad.

“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000.”

Trump blamed Democrats for inflating the number in an effort to argue that he handled the situation in Puerto Rico poorly.

Read the full story here.

RUNDOWN

New York Times Warned of sea level rise, North Carolina chose to favor development

News & Observer Will Duke Energy’s Brunswick nuclear plant’s flood barriers stop Hurricane Florence?

CNBC Larger turbines to help drive growth in European wind energy

Wall Street Journal NYC pension funds to double green investments

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Interested in learning more about pipelines and the important role they play in the energy industry? Check out this clip on the pipeline routing process and community input.

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