The shrinking of the Okjökull glacier from Sept. 14, 1986 (left) to Aug. 1, 2019. Photo: NASA (AP)
Politicians, scientists, and others gathered in Borgarfjörður, Iceland, northeast of Reykjavik on Sunday to mourn the loss of the Okjökull glacier, laying a plaque warning of the impact of climate change, the BBC reported.
Okjökull, along with many other Icelandic glaciers, took serious hits from warming summers over the past two decades. It was officially declared inactive by glaciologist Oddur Sigurðsson in 2014, when he discovered that snow was melting before it could accumulate on the cap, and there was no longer enough pressure being built up to keep the glacier moving.
Scientists Wrote a Eulogy for Iceland’s First Glacier Lost to Climate Change. That may sound like an Onion headline, but alas, it is not. We’ve reached the point in our wild… Read more
At that point, the word jökull (meaning glacier or ice cap) was eliminated from its name, leaving the site formally designated by the name of the shield volcano it was located on, Ok. According to Slate, Rice University anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer were disturbed to see that the elimination of the glacier was almost entirely ignored in the English-language news media, filming a documentary titled Not Ok and later concluding the glacier’s demise should be commemorated.
Attendees arriving for a ceremony at the former Okjökull glacier in Iceland on Aug. 18, 2019. Photo: Felipe Dana (AP)Attendees arriving for a ceremony at the former Okjökull glacier in Iceland on Aug. 18, 2019. Photo: Felipe Dana (AP)
Attendees at the event included Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir, Environment Minister Gudmundur Ingi Gudbrandsson, and former Irish President Mary Robinson, according to the BBC. The plaque itself reads, in both English and Icelandic:
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.
Author Andri Snaer Magnason, who wrote the words on the plaque, told the BBC, “This is a big symbolic moment. Climate change doesn’t have a beginning or end and I think the philosophy behind this plaque is to place this warning sign to remind ourselves that historical events are happening, and we should not normalise them. We should put our feet down and say, okay, this is gone, this is significant.”
Calling Okjökull’s disappearance a “real loss,” Boyle told the BBC, “Plaques recognise things that humans have done, accomplishments, great events. The passing of a glacier is also a human accomplishment—if a very dubious one—in that it is anthropogenic climate change that drove this glacier to melt.”
Glaciers are in bad shape worldwide, from North America and Europe to Greenland and Antarctica. A study in Nature this year estimated that glaciers lost over 10 trillion tons of ice between 1961 and 2016, which is enough volume to cover the entirety of 48 lower states in the U.S. in four feet of snow; another study published in The Cryosphere estimated the Alps will be stripped of 90 percent of its glaciers by the year 2100. According to the Associated Press, the lead author of the first study, World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich director Michael Zemp, said that glaciers are disappearing at five times the rate they were in the 1960s. Zemp added that in central Europe, the Caucasus region, western Canada, and in the lower 48 states, “at the current glacier loss rate, the glaciers will not survive the century.”
Just as troubling, some studies have found that coastal glaciers in Antarctica are melting much faster than expected, which could have dire consequences for sea level rise. Even if humans stopped emitting greenhouse gases on an industrial scale tomorrow, Victoria University of Wellington Antarctic Research Center climate scientist Nick Golledge told Earther, “The scary thing is it keeps melting. We’ve basically set in motion a series of changes which are gonna carry on playing out over the next few centuries at least, maybe thousands of years.”
Sigurðsson told the BBC he has kept an inventory of Icelandic glaciers since 2000, finding that by 2017, 56 of the smaller ones had disappeared.
“150 years ago no Icelander would have bothered the least to see all the glaciers disappear,” Sigurðsson told the news network, referring to the glaciers’ advancement over farmlands and flooding from meltwater. “But since then, while the glaciers were retreating, they are looked at as a beautiful thing, which they definitely are… The oldest Icelandic glaciers contain the entire history of the Icelandic nation. We need to retrieve that history before they disappear.”
“We see the consequences of the climate crisis,” Prime Minister Jakobsdottir told the audience at the ceremony, according to Deutsche Welle. “We have no time to lose.”
Sarah Steel and Michael Bachmann at a press conference accouncing their suit against the air district. Steele later settled. Photo by Bobby Lee
A veteran employee of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District has filed a lawsuit charging that the district destroyed important public records about air pollution, then fired him because he objected.
Through interviews and court documents, Michael Bachmann and coworker Sarah Steele describe an agency culture that accommodated large polluters, shredded records of emission violations, withheld such documents from the public, and violated a legal agreement to preserve its data. A spokesperson for the district declined to comment on the case.
Bachmann had worked for the air district for more than a dozen years when he was asked, in 2014, to take charge of a massive overhaul of the agency’s records. The district was planning to move its headquarters and wanted to inventory, streamline, and digitize its files in preparation for the move.
To help with this task, Bachmann hired his longtime friend Steele, who had experience creating and managing records systems. While she organized paper and microfilm documents, he worked with photographic images stored on computers, creating a digital system to organize and digitize them so they would be searchable.
“My goal was to make sure everybody could see the history,” Steele said. Air District planners need records of past experience to guide future decisions about controlling air pollution. In addition, the district is required by law to retain many types of documents as public records. Steele said part of her motivation for this work came from growing up in El Sobrante, unaware of how pollution from nearby refineries was harming the health of her community. “So few people are aware of the horrific pollution going on in our backyards.” She said it’s important for people to know the history of pollution on a particular piece of land — such as the site of the notorious Berkeley polluter, Pacific Steel Casting, which recently closed.
Bachmann is now restricted from discussing his suit by a recent court-imposed confidentiality rule, but he told his story in interviews before the rule was put into effect. His attorneys, Gary Gwilliam and Jayme Walker, provided additional details in the brief they filed in August 2017 in Contra Costa Superior Court against the district and six senior staff members. Steele, who also was fired in February 2016, was originally part of the lawsuit, but in June of this year she accepted a cash payment to settle her case. Steele and Bachmann, now a couple, were struggling financially after both losing their jobs, and Steele wanted to be free to talk about the case.
As Bachmann and Steele worked on organizing the records, they began noticing things that disturbed them. In the summer of 2015, she said, “giant dumpsters began to appear” in the office. When Steele looked in the dumpsters, she found, among other things, reports of refinery “flaring” incidents, notices of violations of air-pollution standards, and documents pertaining to current litigation — all records that she thought should be kept. In August, according to the lawyers’ brief, an employee in the enforcement division also told Bachmann that documents related to litigation against Pacific Steel Casting were being improperly destroyed.
At around the same time, Steele was working on sending paper and microfilm records to a contractor to digitize. According to the lawyers’ brief, one day air district Director of Enforcement Wayne Kino and attorneys Brian Bunger and Bill Guy “approached [Steele] in an aggressive manner and told her they wanted to destroy microfiche documents containing many records of violations of air quality.” Steele thought that request was illegal and reported it to Bachmann.
In November, Bachmann told senior executives that records were being illegally destroyed and asked that they send documents to him first, rather than putting them straight into dumpsters. In an interview before the confidentiality order was imposed, Bachmann said Bunger overruled this request. He quoted the lawyer as saying, “If staff accidentally destroys these records, that’s OK, because they can only hurt us in the long run.”
Meanwhile, Steele said, boxes of paper and microfilm documents were being shipped to a storage facility in Richmond. But some records were withheld from these shipments, sometimes with explanations, sometimes not. She said the process seemed “haphazard.” She continued to send records to be digitized, but senior officials told her not to digitize certain documents, including records in one huge, locked cabinet that Steele nicknamed the “magic cabinet.”
Steele said Rochelle Reed, public records coordinator, stated in a deposition to the court that the cabinet had not been opened in more than ten years. After the cabinet was moved to Richmond, a staff member sawed off the lock. Inside, Steele found records of asbestos pollution, refinery flares, inspection reports, and settlements between the air district and companies that had been charged with violations. She expressed concern that these documents had not been made available for public records requests. Asked if she felt the district was withholding information from the public, Steele said, “Hell, yeah.”
Another former air district employee, who asked not to be named, agreed that the district had mishandled public documents and destroyed many that should have been kept, but disagreed with Bachmann’s and Steele’s suspicions that this was being done intentionally to keep information from the public. The employee, who was familiar with the document-handling process, expressed the view that rather than “a conspiracy,” the records mishandling was due to “laziness and ineptitude.”
That person, however, also reported having the impression that senior air district officials were reluctant to clash with industrial polluters. If the district were to impose large fines for air-pollution violations, for example, “the refineries would fight tooth and nail — and they have the best lawyers.” The former employee said district officials “want to work with industry, to be on their good side, [to have] a symbiotic relationship.”
Steele believes this cozy relationship interferes with the public’s right to know about air pollution issues.
In December 2015, Bachmann made another disturbing discovery. Over the summer he had downloaded all the photographic images of documents from agency computers. Since then, he had developed a software system for digitizing them to be searchable. But at the end of the year, when he went back to the computers to double check, he found that thousands of these images had disappeared. They included records of violations of air quality standards, complaints and actions taken, asbestos records, and communications between executives and industry. Gaps in numbering showed that documents were missing.
In January 2016, Bachmann reported this to air district senior staff. His supervisor, Eric Stevenson, said later in a court deposition that Bachmann had been “ruffling feathers” of executive management: “He wanted … to be more in control of the documents system as opposed to … allowing the divisions to maintain control of that,” Stevenson said. Under further questioning he added that Bachmann wanted that control because “there was the potential that documents of records could be destroyed.”
Air district employees soon received a flyer with their paychecks reminding them that the office move was imminent and encouraging them to “clear out unwanted/unneeded items.” The flyer specified that “confidential documents” should go into shredder bins and other materials into recycling containers, with no direction about which records to retain. The flyer promised a pizza party to the division with the best-cleaned-out office.
The following month, Bachmann was summoned to a disciplinary meeting where he was told he was being suspended for a week without pay for violating the agency’s vehicle-use policy. Officials said he used an air district car in his commute, a widespread practice specifically allowed in the vehicle-use policy, Bachmann said.
His absence gave agency officials an opportunity to second-guess his work. “When a government employee is suspended without pay,” he noted, “the agency gets access to your computer.” When Bachmann returned after a week, he found that his whole software system for digitizing records had been wiped from his computer — along with all the digitized documents. Fortunately, he said, he had stored all the information on a hard drive and backed it up in the cloud.
On the same day Bachmann was suspended, Steele was told she was being let go because the project was finished. Yet after Steele and Bachmann were gone, she said, the district hired a contractor to continue the work they had been doing.
Even before he returned from his suspension, Bachmann was suspended a second time, this time with pay. However, he maintained access to a security camera at the Richmond storage facility. He showed the Express pictures he said were stills taken by that camera in May 2016. The pictures showed records chief Reed directing a crew that was dumping boxes of stored records into bins, then wheeling them out to a truck labeled “Shred-It.” This despite a 2001 agreement in San Francisco Superior Court in which the air district committed not to destroy any public documents without keeping a record of them.
Bachmann was finally fired in August 2017. At stake for him, as a career employee, was not only his salary but also his access to health care and other retirement benefits — although his retirement income is secure in the state employee pension fund. Reasons given for his firing were “misconduct,” “insubordination,” and “dishonesty.” The air district claimed he had misrepresented his military service and education on his employment application, but Bachmann said he has documents verifying these records.
As a career employee, Bachmann was entitled to due process in a “Skelly hearing,” named after a court case that established this right. According to law, the officer conducting the hearing is supposed to be impartial. But Steele pointed out that Bachmann’s hearing was conducted by Jeff McKay, one of the district officials charged in the lawsuit with destroying records.
The lawsuit is moving slowly, but scheduled to go to trial in December. So far the court has taken depositions from eleven air district staff members. Last April, Walker said, it imposed a fine on the district for “abusing the discovery process and not producing documents that they should have produced.”
Old, small plants were the early retirees, but several of the biggest U.S. coal burners—and CO2 emitters-will be shuttered by year’s end
Scientific American, by Benjamin Storrow, E&E News, 16 Aug 2019
The Navajo Generating Station, near Page, Ariz., is scheduled to close this year. It’s one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the U.S. power sector. Credit: David Wall Getty Images
When the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona shuts down later this year, it will be one of the largest carbon emitters to ever close in American history.
The giant coal plant on Arizona’s high desert emitted almost 135 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2017, according to an E&E News review of federal figures.
Its average annual emissions over that period are roughly equivalent to what 3.3 million passenger cars would pump into the atmosphere in a single year. Of all the coal plants to be retired in the United States in recent years, none has emitted more.
The Navajo Generating Station isn’t alone. It’s among a new wave of super-polluters headed for the scrap heap. Bruce Mansfield, a massive coal plant in Pennsylvania, emitted nearly 123 million tons between 2010 and 2017. It, too, will be retired by year’s end (Energywire, Aug. 12).
And in western Kentucky, the Paradise plant emitted some 102 million tons of carbon over that period. The Tennessee Valley Authority closed two of Paradise’s three units in 2017. It will close the last one next year (Greenwire, Feb. 14).
“It’s just the economics keep moving in a direction that favors natural gas and renewables. Five years ago, it was about the older coal plants becoming uneconomic,” said Dan Bakal, senior director of electric power at Ceres, which works with businesses to transition to clean energy. “Now, it’s becoming about every coal unit, and it’s a question of how long they can survive.”
Coal plant closures have been a feature of U.S. power markets for the better part of a decade, as stagnant demand, low natural gas prices and increasing competition from renewables have battered the coal fleet.
In previous years, most retirements were made up of smaller and lesser-used units (Climatewire, April 27, 2017). That means the emissions reductions were less substantial.
In 2015, the United States closed 15 gigawatts of coal capacity, or roughly 5% of the coal fleet. That still stands as a record amount of coal capacity retired in one year.
Yet the emissions reductions were modest by today’s standards. The units retired in 2015 emitted a combined 261 million tons in the six years prior to their retirement, according to an E&E News review of EPA emissions data. On average, they annually emitted about 43 million tons over that period.
Contrast that to 2018, when almost 14 GW of coal was retired. Those units emitted 511 million tons of carbon between 2010 and 2015. Their combined average annual emissions rate was 83 million tons.
The trend figures to be even more dramatic this year.
SMALL PLANTS ARE GONE
The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects almost 8 GW of coal to retire in 2019, or a little more than half the capacity retired in 2015. Yet the units retired this year emitted more than their 2015 counterparts. Between 2010 and 2015, their combined emissions were 328 million tons, giving them an annual emissions average of 55 million tons.
Other factors are also at play in the retirement of coal’s behemoths. In some cases, federal air quality regulations or an exodus of customers may have contributed to the closure, said John Larsen, who leads power-sector analysis at the Rhodium Group, an economic consulting firm.
The Navajo Generating Station is a case in point. The plant had already planned to shut down a unit to comply with federal smog regulations. Two utilities with a stake in the facility had either divested from the plant or plan to do so. And the plant’s largest customer announced it could buy power on the wholesale market for less.
“You notice the average size of retired plants going up over time. There are not a lot of small plants left, period,” Larsen said. “Once you’ve cleared out all the old inefficient stuff, it’s logical the next wave would be bigger and have more implications for the climate.”
There are several caveats to consider. Units scheduled for retirement generally produce less in the years running up to their closure, meaning the plants that closed in 2015 once emitted more than they did near the end of their lives.
There’s also this: The vast majority of super-polluters have no closure date in sight. That’s because massive coal plants generally benefit from large economies of scale. Because they crank out power around the clock, their cost of generating electricity is relatively cheap.
“The coal plants remaining have generally installed all the environmental controls,” Larsen said. “There are no additional regulatory threats, or they are cost-effective in a world where gas is $2.50 per MMBtu.”
Another caveat: Coal plant closures don’t guarantee power-sector emissions reductions on their own. In 2018, power-sector emissions increased for the first time in many years because electricity demand rose, prompting natural gas generation to spike (Climatewire, Jan. 14).
But if there is a notable trend with the current round of plant closures, it is this: The large coal plants closing today are in places like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
“You’re not seeing climate policy close these plants,” said Mike O’Boyle, director of electricity policy for Energy Innovation, a nonprofit that advocates for a transition to clean energy. “Coal plants are becoming more expensive to operate over time.”
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.
This week, the US Department of Energy released a report that looks back on the state of wind power in the US by running the numbers on 2018. The analysis shows that wind hardware prices are dropping, even as new turbine designs are increasing the typical power generated by each turbine. As a result, recent wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant.
Wind is even cheaper at the moment because of a tax credit given to renewable energy generation. But that credit is in the process of fading out, leading to long term uncertainty in a power market where demand is generally stable or dropping.
A lot of GigaWatts
2018 saw about 7.6 GigaWatts of new wind capacity added to the grid, accounting for just over 20 percent of the US’ capacity additions. This puts it in third place behind natural gas and solar power. That’s less impressive than it might sound, however, given that things like coal and nuclear are essentially at a standstill. Because the best winds aren’t evenly distributed in the US, there are areas, like parts of the Great Plains, where wind installations were more than half of the new power capacity installed.
Overall, that brings the US’ installed capacity up to nearly 100GW. That leaves only China ahead of the US, although the gap is substantial with China having more than double the US’ installed capacity. It still leaves wind supplying only 6.5 percent of the US’ total electricity in 2018, though, which places it behind a dozen other countries. Four of them—Denmark, Germany, Ireland, and Portugal—get over 20 percent of their total electric needs supplied by wind, with Denmark at over 40 percent.
That figure is notable, as having over 30 percent of your power supplied by an intermittent source is a challenge for many existing grids. But there are a number of states that have now cleared the 30 percent threshold: Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma, with the two Dakotas not far behind. The Southwest Power Pool, which serves two of those states plus wind giant Texas, is currently getting a quarter of its electricity from wind. (Texas leads the US with 25GW of installed wind capacity.)
Enlarge/ Despite having a lot of wind installed, the US uses far more power from other sources. US DOE
So while wind remains a small factor in the total electricity market in the US, there are parts of the country where it’s a major factor in the generating mix. And, given the prices, those parts are likely to expand.
Plummeting prices
In the US, the prices for wind power had risen up until 2009, when power purchase agreements for wind-generated electricity peaked at about $70 per MegaWatt-hour. Since then, there’s been a very steady decline, and 2018 saw the national average fall below $20/MW-hr for the first time. Again, there’s regional variation with the Great Plains seeing the lowest prices, in some cases reaching the mid-teens.
That puts wind in an incredibly competitive position. The report uses an estimate of future natural gas prices that show an extremely gradual rise of about $10/MW-hr out to 2050. But natural gas—on its own, without considering the cost of a plant to burn it for electricity—is already over $20/MW-hr. That means wind sited in the center of the US is already cheaper than fueling a natural gas plant, and wind sited elsewhere is roughly equal.
Enlarge/ Those black bars are the price of gas. Blue circles are wind, while yellow are solar. US DOE
The report notes that photovoltaics have reached prices that are roughly equivalent to wind, but those got there from a starting point of about $150/MW-hr in 2009. Thus, unless natural gas prices reverse the expected trend and get cheaper, wind and solar will remain the cheapest sources of new electricity in the US.
The levelized cost of electricity, which eliminates the impact of incentives and subsidies on the final prices, places wind below $40/MW-hr in 2018. The cheapest form of natural gas generation was roughly $10 more per MegaWatt-hour. Note that, as recently as 2015, the US’ Energy Information Agency was predicting that wind’s levelized cost in 2020 would be $74/MW-hr.
Built on better tech
Why has wind gotten much cheaper than expected? Part of it is in improved technology. The report notes that in 2008, there were no turbines installed in the US with rotors above 100 meters in diameter. In 2018, 99 percent of them were over 100m, and the average size was 116m. In general, the turbine’s generator grew in parallel. The average capacity for 2018 installs was 2.4MW, which is up five percent from the year previous.
The area swept by the blades goes up with the square of their length. Thus, even though blade length and rated generating capacity are going up in parallel, the actual potential energy input from the blades is growing much faster. This has the effect of lowering what’s called the specific power of the wind turbine. These lower specific power turbines work better in areas where the wind isn’t as strong or consistent. On the truly windy days, they’ll saturate the ability of the generator to extract power, while on a more typical day when the winds are lighter or erratic, they’ll get more out of them.
So even though more turbines are being built at sites without the best wind resources, we’re generating more power per turbine. The capacity factor—the amount of power generated relative to the size of the generator—for projects built in the previous four years has now hit 42 percent, a figure that would once have required offshore wind. That’s dragged the capacity factor of the entire US wind industry up to over 35 percent for the first time last year.
Enlarge/ Each year, the capacity factor of newly installed projects is typically higher than that of the years prior. US DOE
The economics of these low-wind designs are so good that 23 existing sites were “repowered,” with new, larger rotors replacing older hardware on existing towers. One thing that may be encouraging this is that older plants (those a decade old or more) seem to see a small dip in capacity factor over time. But the reason for this isn’t clear at this point, so it’s something that will have to be tracked in the future.
Better grid management also helped the economics of wind. At times, strong winds can cause wind farms to produce an excess of power relative to demand, causing a farm’s output to be reduced. This process, called curtailment, remained a small factor, with only two percent of the potential generation lost this way. Put differently, if the curtailed electricity had been used, it would have only raised the average capacity factor by 0.7 percentage points.
Overall, given these economics, it’s clear that the economic case for wind energy will remain solid as the tax credits for the construction of renewable energy fade out over the next few years. But the vanishing credits are causing lots of developers to start projects sooner rather than later, so we may see a bubble in construction for the next couple of years, followed by a dramatic drop off.
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