Puerto Rico’s shakedown, air-tight homes, and an American nuclear milestone
3 stories about energy that show the hope and challenges amid the world's hottest month ever.
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July 2023 was our planet’s hottest month since records began and, based on evidence from sediment in ancient ice, likely the hottest in 120,000 years. But few needed to hear it from scientists trained in the once-obscure field of paleoclimatology to know it was a scorcher. Heat waves settled over much of the United States, breaking temperature records by the week. Air conditioning offered temporary – and often expensive – reprieve from the ceaseless sauna outside.
That is, if you could afford the electricity to run your cooling appliance. Or if you had access to electricity at all.
Those are open questions in Puerto Rico, where heat index values soared as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit in June during a historic Caribbean heat wave that received far less attention than the subsequent temperature records broken in U.S. states weeks later.
On a rare day when electricity flows steadily from the archipelago’s grid, Puerto Ricans pay nearly twice as much per kilowatt hour as the average American, despite suffering worse poverty than the poorest U.S. state. But nearly six years after Hurricane María, the most populous U.S. territory’s power still goes out weekly if not daily. And two years after a private U.S.-Canadian joint venture took over electricity sales from the state-owned power company, rates have gone up and up to help cover the costs of reconstruction and modernization of a system that buckled long before it was wrecked by a Category 5 storm.
The big reason for that decay? The government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority was nearly $9 billion in debt and couldn’t pay back its creditors, much less make costly infrastructure upgrades.
Now Puerto Ricans may be asked to personally pay back what’s owed for decades to come as a forthcoming debt-restructuring deal is expected to include a big rate hike.
The debt traces back to the late 1990s, when then-President Bill Clinton and Republicans in Congress ended a federal tax break that had made Puerto Rico a manufacturing hub. When factories fled, the Puerto Rican government made up the difference by borrowing money on the bond market. By the time the territory went bankrupt, it had more than $120 billion in debt and unfunded pension obligations.
The bonds changed hands. As the debt became a higher-risk “distressed” asset, the Wall Street equivalent of loan sharks swooped in to buy the bonds at a fire-sale price and proceeded to invest money into lawsuits demanding repayment. It is for that reason that critics call these investors “vulture” funds.
The unelected fiscal oversight board Congress put in charge of Puerto Rico’s finances must now negotiate a deal with creditors that wins the approval of a federal judge. The process could take months. But any rate hike would take a major toll on Americans already pushed to the brink.
You can read more about that here on HuffPost.
For those desperate to keep their hard-earned air conditioning from leaking outside through drafty windows and doors, there is some relief on the way. The Biden administration last week started taking applications from states for a cut of the $5.4 billion earmarked in the Inflation Reduction Act for rebates to homeowners whose renovations cut back on wasted energy.
It’s a first step, but a big one. Officials at the Energy Department told me they believe homeowners will start receiving money through state energy offices later this year.
But the total energy savings depend a lot on how states design the programs. Federal regulators offered some guidelines, but a lot is up to the states. And at least one state – Florida – has said it would decline any federal money at all, a perhaps cynical part of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid to take on Biden for the White House next year.
You can read that full story here on HuffPost.
While it’s not as dramatic as in Puerto Rico, the U.S. overall has seen power outages increase as global warming spikes demand for electricity and reliable coal and nuclear plants shut down.
Phasing out coal is vital to keeping worldwide temperatures from surging ever higher. But you, dear reader of this newsletter, already know that closing nuclear reactors is disastrous for the climate. That’s because atomic reactors produce unrivaled volumes of zero-carbon electricity, and tend to do so about 90% of the time they’re in operation. Compare that to solar panels, which typically generate power no more than 25% of the time. With wind, it’s about 35% of the time. For natural gas, the controversial back-up for weather-dependent renewables, it’s still only about 50% of the time.
The trouble is, nuclear plants are expensive to build, and the market systems that dictate the energy mix in most states aren’t designed to shepherd a high-cost project through a decade or more of construction. For these reasons and many more, the U.S. has just one new nuclear reactor in the works.
But the fact that it’s one is a major achievement insofar as it was, until this week, two.
On Monday, Unit 3 of Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle in northern Georgia entered into commercial operation, becoming the first new reactor added to the grid in nearly a decade, the first record built from scratch in decades, and the country’s first “advanced” reactor ever completed at a commercial site.
The move could herald the nuclear renaissance the industry has been touting for a while now – but it will likely also generate debate over what kind of reactors should come after Vogtle Unit 4 comes online, probably next year.
You can read that full story, too, here on HuffPost.
“In the real world, folks, this is how things go. But this is ultimately not a zero sum game. If other people want these things, go get them. Do the work to establish such a tradition in your family, if that’s what they want to do.”
- Rob Longsworth, an investment manager who was the seventh in his family to attend Amherst College, to The New York Times in defense of legacy admissions.
Flying from Gate H2. The first hydrogen-powered planes are taking flight across the U.S. and England, showing the potential fuel cells have to decarbonize small aviation, Canary Media reports.
“Who gets to block an energy project?” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer has an excellent piece examining the stakes of Sen. Joe Manchin’s permitting reform fight, probing at the questions of whose priorities matter most in a democratic system of building infrastructure.
Strange climate bedfellows. The far-right former Iowa Rep. Steve King is teaming up with environmentalists to fight a giant carbon dioxide pipeline meant to channel captured CO2 from ethanol plants to underground storage wells, The New York Times reports.
Apartment construction is way up. Just look at this chart from The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein tweeted.
Even in Los Angeles… The L.A. Times profiled a developer who is trying to level houses in the city of single-family homes and build lots of apartments.
…but not on Long Island. In Huntington, where I grew up, New York Focus’ Sam Mellins attended a heated town meeting where a resident warned that building any more apartments would mean “migrants, pedophiles or criminals” moving in. And yes, those three were lumped together and listed in that order.
Niger’s coup and France’s U. The West African nation’s military ousted the elected president, raising concerns about the future of uranium exports from the country to its former colonial power, France. Le Monde reports that uranium giant Orano has activated its crisis unit to watch over its three uranium mines in the country, only one of which is active.
You can’t spell turmoil without oil. There’s also a big question of how the Niger coup will affect Chinese plans to build a 1,200-mile oil pipeline from Niger through Benin to a port on the Gulf of Guinea, as the China-Global South Project, which produces an excellent podcast on Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative investments, pointed out:
One trillion dollars. That’s how much it may end up costing to rebuild Ukraine after the war, as The Polycrisis explained from a recent summit in London.
…will it come up short? Just look at the massive funding gap Bloomberg illustrated here between what’s needed and what’s already been pledged to help achieve net-zero goals by 2050:
The California energy diet. Canary’s Jeff St. John has a deep dive into the Golden State’s successful rollout of a “measured” energy savings program, the likes of which you may recall from my last newsletter.
Thank you for your time and attention. If you don’t feel like this newsletter earned it, maybe this song recommendation will.
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Signing off from sunny Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the proximity to Staten Island makes it easy to spend a Sunday afternoon enjoying Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden. More on that for a future newsletter.