NOVEMBER 1, 2023

Hello! We are excited to share that we’re partnering with the Associated Press to strengthen global coverage of climate solutions.

For our first story, I traveled to Cambridge, Mass., and reported alongside an AP journalist about a new MIT course training students to be mediators in clean energy projects facing opposition.

Anca also has a scoop about nuclear’s role in the upcoming climate talks and a shocking chart on the consequences of permitting delays for the offshore wind sector.

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Send your energy photos, story tips and more to news@ciphernews.com.

Exclusive: In a first, MIT trains students to resolve clean energy conflicts

BY: AMY HARDER

Cambridge, Mass.— As the United States injects hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy through its signature climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, criticism is growing louder about where, how and whether new development should be allowed.

As opposition grows, once-routine regulatory processes are taking several years, if they are completed at all. Some communities are concerned about landscape changes, some property values and others wildlife preservation. Layered on top of these debates is misinformation, which sows doubt and mistrust among developers and communities.

In a room on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, a new class offers a glimpse into a novel way of resolving these types of conflicts.

MIT is offering a first-of-its-kind course for the first time where it trains students to be mediators in conflicts over clean energy projects. Supervised by a professional mediator, students work directly with developers, local officials and community members. Students get academic credit and hands-on experience addressing real-world dilemmas, while the community and developer get free help resolving conflict.

“Most coverage of clean energy opposition sloppily reaches for the term NIMBYism,” said Larry Susskind, the MIT professor behind the course, during one recent class a reporter visited. He was referring to the common acronym for “not in my backyard” opposition. Ultimately, Susskind said, such framing delegitimatizes affected community members and stokes acrimony.

Curbing climate change — and extreme weather for future generations — depends squarely on society’s ability to rapidly build new clean energy infrastructure despite the messy puzzle of local, state and federal reviews projects must overcome.

Today, the technologies being built are mostly wind and solar farms, storage facilities and powerlines. In the coming decades, new projects will include everything from carbon dioxide pipelines to facilities capturing CO2 directly from the sky to renewable hydrogen production.

There has been debate in Washington D.C. and elsewhere around the country about how to speed up project reviews. Most has focused on streamlining permitting processes, such as limiting the time local officials can spend on reviews and giving state and federal governments power to overrule local authorities. New York and California recently passed such laws and these could become models for the whole country.

But “this risks simply ignoring community concerns instead of finding ways to make the siting process more just in the eyes of those who are protesting,” Susskind and research colleagues write in an article set to be published in the January 2024 issue of the scientific journal Cell Reports Sustainability.

In Susskind’s class, dubbed the MIT Renewable Energy Clinic, he hopes to create collaboration that may slow down projects initially by incorporating more input but ultimately speed them up by avoiding later-stage conflicts.

In one recent Friday afternoon class, students debated everything from environmental justice concerns to misinformation to oil companies. Ultimately, several students said they will need to put their own opinions aside to assume the role of mediator.

“We must find a way to be fair and create equal conditions for all parties,” Leyla Uysal, a design school student from Harvard University with an urban planning background, said. “It’s going to be difficult, but I will educate myself not to take sides.”

The students, about two dozen across a range of disciplines, ages and other area schools, recently completed a certification exam. The certification prepares them to begin the real-world part of the class. The projects in this first course are two solar farms proposed by Chicago-based Ranger Power for counties in Michigan, which are already facing opposition.

“We’re not starting at the beginning,” Susskind said. “We’re coming in because they are stalled.”

MIT is planning to make the class free to the public online as soon as today (taking the certification exam costs $129).

It’s not Susskind’s first hands-on academic effort. He helped create the first student-led cybersecurity clinic in 2021 to help defend public infrastructure from hacking. It has since expanded to 15 universities and received $20 million from Google this summer.

He hopes to create a similar national consortium of universities serving communities and projects in their respective regions regarding clean energy.

Read the full article on Cipher’s website.

Lunchtime Reads and Hot Takes

G7 offers costly loans, few grants to help Vietnam cut coal – documents — Reuters
Anca’s take: This is an important nuance to keep in mind when discussing rich countries’ pledges to help poorer countries decarbonize. More grants are needed if countries are to sign the deals.

They went hunting for fossil fuels. What they found could help save the world — CNN

Amy’s take: Love the anecdote about the cigarette (as if you need another reason to not smoke). In all seriousness, the potential here feels immense.

Energy Dept. Pours Billions Into Power Grids but Warns It’s Not Enough — The New York Times

Amena’s take: The government is seeking to ensure the success of these projects by entering into contracts with federal dollars to purchase part of the lines' capacities, thereby reducing the risk of incompletion.
 
Will Bangladesh come to regret its dash for gas? — Financial Times (paywall)
Anca’s take: A cautionary tale from a country that, like many others, saw liquified natural gas as a cleaner short-term alternative to coal. Now it's struggling with blackouts and falling foreign reserves, threatening the economy.
 
Engineers Create ‘Air Conditioning’ for Salmon With Chilled Patches of River Water — Smithsonian Magazine
Bill’s take: This is the sort of necessary, but, sadly, insufficient adaptation that will increasingly be needed to preserve habitats. Faster emissions cuts would be better.
 
AI threats are here. Are Biden and the energy industry ready? — E&E News (paywall)
Amena’s take: As our cars, homes, industries and power grids gravitate towards a more efficient, AI-driven system, the White House call for security protocols and standards is a welcome development.

Carbon Offset Market Faces Chaos as African Mega-Project Collapses — Bloomberg

Amy’s take: Sounds like chaos, as the story notes. Why not divert all this time, energy and money to real emission reductions through new tech and policy?
 
How solid-state batteries could transform transport — Financial Times (paywall)
Bill’s take: The push for solid state electrical storage underscores how much leeway the battery industry still has to improve performance and push down cost per mile driven, critical to selling more EVs.

Ghana power crisis: Limited gas supply triggers nationwide power outage — BBC

Anca’s take: The combo of financial distress and energy poverty is a huge challenge for lower income countries — and for the energy transition.

How one hospital will use rooftop solar to pay patients’ electric bills — E&E News (paywall)

Amy’s take: What a cool, unique way to both help people and grow clean energy.

More of what we're reading:

• Future of fossil fuels leaves nations at odds ahead of UN climate summit — Financial Times (paywall) 

• Biden Administration Approves Biggest Offshore Wind Farm yet, in Virginia — The New York Times

• Companies capture a lot of CO2. Most of it is going into new oil. — The Washington Post
• Exclusive: EU executive proposes methane emissions limit on gas imports – document — Reuters

Exclusive: U.S. pushes to ensure nuclear “is not forgotten” in COP renewables pledge

The Cruas nuclear power plant in France. Photo credit: Nachteule via iStock.

BY: ANCA GURZU

The United States is working behind the scenes to ensure nuclear power is not excluded from an expected global pledge to boost renewables at the upcoming climate summit in Dubai, Cipher has learned.

It’s also pushing for language that recognizes the need to halt investments in new coal power plants.

The European Union and the United Arab Emirates, the host of this year’s climate negotiations known as COP28, have been calling on countries in recent months to agree in Dubai on global goals to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency by 2030.

The move — a side governmental initiative in parallel with official climate negotiations steered by the United Nations — is a significant diplomatic push and the resulting pledge is one of the main expected deliverables at the summit.

Support for the renewables pledge has been growing in the run-up to COP28, which will kick off on November 30. At their meeting in September, the world’s wealthiest countries, known as the Group of 20, agreed to “pursue and encourage efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally.”

While no change is foreseen in the headline goal, the U.S. is pushing for additional language (known as framing language in diplomatic speak) to accompany the main pledge that would ensure other low-emission technologies, such as nuclear power, are not overlooked.

“We want to ensure nuclear is not forgotten and is complementary to the global pledge to boost renewables and clean energy at COP28,” a top U.S. official told Cipher on condition of anonymity to be able to speak candidly.

The move is a nod to advanced nuclear technologies, such as small modular reactors, which the U.S. is hoping to partly rely on to decarbonize its economy. It’s also meant to broaden countries’ options as they work to transform their power sectors to align with the goal of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Read the full article on Cipher’s website.

Permitting delays could massively slow offshore wind growth

Source: DNV Energy Transition Outlook 2023.

BY: ANCA GURZU

The amount of offshore wind poised to be built around the world each year within this decade is set to be about 30% less than what could have been built without permitting delays, according to a new report from consultancy DNV.

Permitting bottlenecks for renewable energy projects have been getting more attention from policymakers over the last year, but more solutions are needed to speed up installations, the Oslo-based organization writes in its recent Energy Transition Outlook 2023.

The global offshore wind industry is facing a host of challenges, including permitting delays but also surging inflation and supply chain bottlenecks. The European Commission is considering legislation seeking to help its ailing sector, and top U.S. government officials have also indicated they’re trying to do more to help the fledgling American sector.

The chart above highlights how global offshore wind capacity could grow over the next seven years if projects face no permitting delays — and how current permitting delays could hold back installations.

In the next couple of years, the gap between the two scenarios is not much, but by 2029 it becomes so large that the potential amount of capacity that could be built without permitting delays is more than double what is most likely to be built, DNV found.

Total installed wind power capacity around the world in 2022 was 950 gigawatts (GW), the majority of which consisted of onshore wind turbines. Wind capacity is expected to grow to 1,950 GW by 2030 and to 6,400 GW by mid-century under the “most likely future” scenario, according to the analysis, which includes existing permitting delays.

China stands to lead in both onshore and fixed offshore wind (with turbines anchored to the ocean floor), while Europe is shaping up to be a leader in floating offshore wind power.

It can take up to 10 years to build a wind energy project, especially offshore, according to the analysis. It’s a challenge Cipher has written about, including how antiquated permitting procedures across the European Union are holding projects back.

AND FINALLY...
Hydropower history

Cipher reader and economist at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Mickey Francis, sent in this photo from Krka National Park in Croatia, the site of one of the world’s earliest hydroelectric power plants. The original plant was opened in 1895, shut down in 1913 and later demolished to make war materials for World War I. A replacement plant downriver, opened in 1904, is still in operation.

Each week, we feature a photo that is somehow related to energy, the thing we all need but don’t notice until it’s expensive or gone. Email your ideas and photos to news@ciphernews.com.

Editor’s note: In addition to supporting Cipher, Breakthrough Energy also supports and partners with a range of entities working to tackle climate change, including nonprofits, corporations, startups and research firms. For more information on Cipher’s editorial policy, click here.