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“A pair of hurricanes and an earthquake left Puerto Rico’s power system in tatters.

But now residents and clean-energy advocates see hope in the island’s effort to rebuild the electric grid — saying it could offer the rest of the nation a model for achieving President Joe Biden’s ambitions for a reliable power network free of greenhouse gas pollution.

First, though, the U.S. territory has to get past a pitched fight over the privatization of its power grid, as well as a debate on how to leverage billions in recovery dollars from the federal government.

The electricity network that serves 3 million people in Puerto Rico has long suffered from outages that experts blame on poor management and under-investment. And its transition to a cleaner, more reliable power system is off to a rough start.

Just six months into a 15-year contract to run Puerto Rico’s electricity transmission and distribution network, LUMA Energy is facing protests from residents who say blackouts have worsened, criticism from greens that it is moving too slowly to add renewable power and growing scrutiny from the territory’s legislature. That last dynamic reached a peak in November when lawmakers sought the arrest of the company’s top executive.

LUMA, owned by Canada’s ATCO group and U.S.-based Quanta Services, has also become the target of an activist campaign seeking to revoke its contract, an effort that has drawn the attention of the House Natural Resources Committee, which is looking into whether the company is living up to its promises.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has $9.4 billion — the largest amount awarded in the agency’s history — allocated to restore and protect Puerto Rico’s power network from the type of disasters that have plagued it.

Renewable energy and consumer advocates say that money is best spent on putting solar panels on the roofs of every home on the sunny island, with the aim of creating a decentralized source of power generation. This could minimize the widespread blackouts that have occurred when storms damage the miles of power lines that run across rugged terrain from the oil-fired power plants that provide most of the island’s electricity.

Those plants are still owned by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the local government-owned utility being privatized that turned the grid over to LUMA and which most experts blame for years of poor management. Besides being plagued by blackouts, the grid is expensive: Residents on the island paid an average of 19.24 cents per kilowatt hour in 2020, nearly 50 percent higher than the average U.S. home.

A new coalition of clean energy, union and other organizations, Queremos Sol, is lobbying federal officials to intervene in the rebuilding to sharply expand the amount of solar energy on the island. It says such an initiative aligns with Biden’s plan to achieve 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity nationwide by 2035, as well as his goals of transitioning away from fossil fuel infrastructure that has been primarily sited in low-income areas and communities of color.

“Puerto Rico is a very big test,”

Link

www.politico.com

Puerto Rico’s shattered power grid could become a ‘big experiment’ for Biden

The crumbling electricity network that serves the island's 3 million people is at the center of a debate on renewable energy vs. fossil fuels — with billions of federal dollars at stake.

"Long-simmering speculations about where to hide from climate change picked up in February 2019 when the mayor of Buffalo, New York, declared that the city on Lake Erie’s eastern edge would one day become a “climate refuge.” Two months later, a New York Times article made the case that Duluth, Minnesota, on the western corner of Lake Superior, could be an attractive new home for Texans and Floridians looking to escape blistering temperatures.

“In this century, climate migration will be larger, and is already by some measures larger, than political or economic migration”

Link

grist.org

Fleeing global warming? ‘Climate havens’ aren’t ready for you yet.

Climate migration is already underway. Here's how cities can prepare.

“A prominent Stanford University professor has outlined a roadmap for the United States to meet its total energy needs using 100% wind, water and solar by 2050.
…
The Achilles’ heel of a completely renewable grid, many argue, is that it is not stable enough to be reliable. Blackouts have become a particular concern, notably in Texas this year and during the summer of 2020 in California.

That’s where four-hour batteries come in as a way to generate grid stability. “I discovered this all just because I have batteries in my own home,” Jacobson told CNBC. “And I figured, oh, my God, this is so basic. So obvious. I can’t believe nobody has figured this out.”
…
Planning, of course, is also key to keeping the grid stable. “Wind is variable, solar is variable,” Jacobson said. “But it turns out, first of all, when you interconnect wind and solar over large areas, which is currently done, you smooth out the supply quite a bit. So it’s because, you know, when the wind is not blowing in one place, it’s usually blowing somewhere else. So over a large region, you have a smoother supply of energy.”

Similarly, wind and solar power are complimentary. And hydropower “is perfect backup, because you can turn it on and off instantaneously,” he said.
…
Direct link to PDF paper: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-USStates-PDFs/21-USStatesPaper.pdf

Link

www.cnbc.com

Access Denied

“A big part of this movie’s brilliance lies in its indirect metaphor—a giant comet that no one on Earth, no matter how rich or mobile, can avoid. The Earth-destroying threat will arrive in six months. The comet becomes a wonderful vehicle for maligning the toxic political economy and mediascape that prevails today. In the world of Don’t Look Up—an only slightly more farcical version of the sphere we occupy—anyone who hopes to be listened to has to be media-friendly, bad news must be made light and digestible, and hard truths are immediately levied as ammunition for the partisan culture wars.

What I found most effective—and, in the wake of Joe Machin’s attempt to torpedo Build Back Better, cathartic—was McKay’s deft demonstration of how solutions to problems get deferred in favor of corporate profits. Enter Don’t Look Up’s true villain—a Musk/Branson mashup of a technocrat billionaire (played by Mark Rylance). A huge donor to the scandal-mired president, he’s able to dismiss government plans to launch missiles at the comet and instead push a private-sector effort to send a fleet of space drones that will “mine the comet for rare minerals and return them to Earth,” claiming that doing so will put an end to world hunger, nuclear threats, and somehow, biodiversity loss. (Yes, he and his wealthy investors stand to profit greatly from this risky venture.) Could this be a stand-in for carbon-capture, geo-engineering, and other glittery techno-fixes that stand to get rich guys richer? And without spoiling the ending, this film’s got spot-on allegories to climate bunkers and “Planet B,” too.

The movie does not offer solutions to anything it highlights. Rather, it ultimately lands like an extended riff on Chicken Little that attempts to show perhaps too many ways in which we as a species are hopelessly myopic when it comes to our capacity for collective action. Don’t Look Up is a different kind of disaster movie—the threat that’s really being highlighted isn’t something still to come, but rather the state of affairs as they now stand.”

Link

www.sierraclub.org

“Don’t Look Up” is Cinematic Catharsis for the Climate-Concerned

Inside the funniest and most deeply un-fun film you’ll watch this holiday