Imagine if you could walk from your house to anywhere you needed to go in less than 15 minutes: the pharmacy, the bakery, the gym, and then back to the bakery. In a certain, conspiracy-addled corner of the internet, this urban planning concept of “15-minute cities” gets a shady, sinister gloss. Conspiracy theorists evoke COVID restrictions and tout efforts to create walkable cities as steps toward “climate lockdowns.” They warn of a plot by the World Economic Forum to restrict people’s movements, trapping and surveilling them in their neighborhoods. 

“They want to take away your cars,” claims Clayton Morris, a former Fox News host, in a YouTube video that’s been viewed 1.7 million times.

YouTube is riddled with false claims like these, so it’s the place to document the evolution of arguments against taking action on climate change. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit based in London and Washington, D.C., working to stop the spread of disinformation, analyzed 12,000 videos from channels that promoted lies about climate change on YouTube over the last six years. Over that time, the reality of climate change long predicted by scientists has become increasingly difficult to dismiss. The report, released on Tuesday, found a dramatic shift from “old denial” arguments — that global warming isn’t real and isn’t caused by humans — to new arguments bent on undermining trust in climate solutions.

“The success is that the science has won this debate on anthropogenic climate change,” said Imran Ahmed, the nonprofit’s founder and CEO. “The opponents of action have shifted their attention.”

The report suggests that, rather than doing a victory lap, climate advocates may want to focus on defending climate policies and renewable energy as necessary and effective. As the world was besieged by intense heat, expansive wildfires, and catastrophic floods in recent years, YouTubers promoting disinformation increasingly embraced “new denial” narratives, such as that solar panels will destroy the economy and the environment, or that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a “fraud.”

“What it is doing is creating a cohort of people who believe climate change is happening, but believe there’s no hope,” Ahmed said. People start watching YouTube at a young age — in 2020, more than half of parents in the U.S. with a child 11 years old or younger said their kid watched videos on the platform on a daily basis. New polling from the center, released alongside the study, found that a third of U.S. teens say that climate policies cause more harm than good.

Six years ago, these “new denial” claims made up 35 percent of denier’s arguments on YouTube; now, they make up 70 percent of the total. The fastest-growing assertions were that the climate movement is unreliable and that clean energy won’t work.

To get this data, the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed video transcripts from nearly 100 YouTube channels that spout climate denial, using an artificial intelligence tool to categorize the arguments. 

One popular source is the channel of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and culture warrior with 7 million followers. In an interview with Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Epstein makes the case that climate advocates can’t be trusted. “Listening to a modern environmentalist is like listening to a doctor who’s on the side of the germs, somebody who doesn’t have your best interests at heart,” Epstein says in a video entitled “The Great Climate Con” that’s been viewed a million times, reiterating a point once made in the 1990s by the economist George Reisman in an article titled “The Toxicity of Environmentalism.”

The report also points to the libertarian think tank The Heartland Institute and the media company BlazeTV, created by the former Fox News host Glenn Beck, as prominent sources of lies about climate change on YouTube. Videos from PragerU, a right-wing media outlet also known for spreading disinformation, paint solar and wind power as dangers to the environment and compare environmental activists to Nazis. Despite what the name may imply, it’s not actually a university, nor does it offer any degrees.

John Cook, a researcher at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change in Australia, has documented a similar rise in attacks on climate solutions by conservative think tanks and blogs. “It’s surprising to see misinformation on YouTube shifting so quickly,” Cook said in an email. “The future of climate misinformation will be focused on attacking climate solutions, and we need to better understand those arguments and how to counter them.”

Some research has shown that climate disinformation is compelling: A recent study in Nature Human Behavior found that it’s often more persuasive to people than scientific facts. And once people latch onto a falsehood, they find it hard to let go. That’s why stopping disinformation at the source is so important, according to Ahmed. “The key right now is ensuring that we aren’t flooding our information ecosystem with nonsense and lies that make it more difficult for people to work out what’s true or not,” he said.

Together, the YouTube channels that the center focused on garnered 3.4 billion views last year. And all those views means there’s money involved: The report found that YouTube is potentially making up to $13.4 million a year in ad revenue from channels that post climate denial.

Google, which owns YouTube, promised in 2021 to ban ads on its platforms alongside content that contradicts the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and caused by humans (though it hasn’t enforced it well). To counter the latest wave of disinformation, the Center for Countering Digital Hate recommends that Google should also prohibit advertisements on content that pushes misinformation about climate solutions, so that YouTubers won’t be incentivized to publish more of it. (Content creators who partner with YouTube receive a share of the ad revenue.)

“If it wasn’t profitable, would so many people see it as being a business to produce bullshit?” Ahmed said. “We’re asking platforms to not reward liars with money and attention.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How YouTube’s climate deniers turned into climate doomers on Jan 16, 2024.

As day broke over the small mountain town of Elliston, Virginia, one Monday in October, masked figures in thick coats emerged from the woods surrounding a construction site. Three of them approached three excavators and, one by one, locked themselves to the machines, bringing the day’s work to a halt. As they did so, several dozen of their fellow protesters gathered around them, unfurling banners and chanting amid the groaning and beeping of construction equipment. 

They made their way across the field, over patches of bare earth, around sections of rusty pipe meant for burial beneath the mountain. Eventually the metal tubes will form yet another section of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will soon carry 2 billion cubic feet of fracked methane from the shale fields of West Virginia to North Carolina each day. Their breath billowed in the crisp air. Beyond them stretched a bright blue sky, and mountains tinged with yellow. The past night’s rain pooled on the muddy and compacted soil beneath their feet.

Workers in highlighter-yellow vests and hard hats milled around, some looking amused, others frustrated. One or two engaged with the protesters, only to be told off by an irate site manager. A few miles away at the West Virginia state line, another three dozen or so activists did much the same atop Peters Mountain. One even managed to crawl under an excavator and lock herself in place, despite the cold. The others rallied around, enclosing her in a tight, protective circle.

Some might wonder why they bothered. After all, the project is, by the Mountain Valley Pipeline company’s estimate, 94 percent complete and will be wrapped up before summer. It stalled for several years amid legal fights over various permits, but Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, almost single-handedly revived it in 2022 in exchange for his support of key Democratic priorities. Since then, the Biden administration and the Supreme Court have all but assured its completion. With the approximately 303-mile pipeline approaching the final stretch after almost a decade’s work, it might seem hardly worth fighting at this point.

A large contingent of steadfast opposition begs to differ — and will enthusiastically explain why. The pipeline is six years behind schedule, about half a billion dollars over budget, and, despite promises that it would be done by the end of last year, delayed once again. The remaining construction is over rugged terrain, with hundreds of water crossings left to bridge. The company recently postponed, shortened, and rerouted its planned extension into North Carolina, a proposal long stymied by permitting problems with the main line. And, just last month, Equitrans, which owns the pipeline and many others across the country, was said to be considering selling itself. The road to the pipeline’s completion remains rocky, its opponents argue, with many opportunities to make finishing it as difficult as possible.

“We cannot let them destroy our land and water,” said a young woman named Ericka. Like many interviewed for this story, she gave only her first name out of fear of reprisal from Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, which has begun suing protesters in a bid to silence them. She had brought her three children to occupy the land that day. “What are we going to drink? Where are we going to live? People have to come here and stop this.”

Killing the project is their ideal outcome. Barring that, those who have for almost a decade packed public hearings, spent weeks at sit-ins and even lived high in trees for 932 days want to make building pipelines so time-consuming, so expensive, so plain annoying, that fossil fuel companies and the politicians who support them think twice about green-lighting any more.

Even as pipeline crews continue steadily boring under rivers and felling trees, activists say each day they can delay construction is another day humanity delays the worst impacts of climate change. The increasingly grave personal and legal risks they face are, they say, worth it, if only for that.

“For five f—g years, we’ve fought you without fear,” sang the masked figures on Peters Mountain, and “we’ll fight you for five f—g more.”

Morning ripened over the ridge and the fog rolled in, then out. The pipeline workers retreated, mostly without complaint — followed by the protestors’ calls of, “Paid time off! Paid time off!” Some of those gathered began to sing: John Prine songs about beautiful landscapes stripped for coal, union songs, and striking miners’ ballads that reverberated through the same ridges long ago. When their voices grew weary, someone blared dance music through a loudspeaker as police cars rumbled up the gravel access road. They tried not to be afraid as the sirens grew louder, knowing the risk they had taken in coming here and knowing, as many said, that the time of act is now. 

---

As the nation’s fracking boom reached coal country about a decade ago, pipelines carrying methane began to snake across the landscape. The Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP, met instant fury when Mountain Valley LLC proposed it in 2014. Opposition to the project drew a wide range of people, from farmers in West Virginia to Indigenous tribes in North Carolina, together in a united front. Some were alarmed by what it would mean for their land: Razed trees, disturbed landscapes, water running brown from the tap, and, in the end, a frightening risk of leaks and explosions. A pipeline in Pennsylvania run by one of the companies involved in MVP blew up late last year; a couple and their child suffered severe burns and barely escaped with their lives. Then there’s the longer term, irreversible danger of the 90 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that will come from producing, transporting, and burning all that methane over the 40 to 50 years the pipeline is expected to operate.

Residents along the project’s path joined academics, local organizations, and environmental nonprofits in filing lawsuits, seeking injunctions, and packing hearings. As they worked the legal system, other activists staged equipment lockdowns, organized rallies, and took to the trees for monthslong sit-ins. The efforts led to some wins. Opponents repeatedly delayed construction, got various permits thrown out, and leveled allegations of water quality violations and illegal work on national forest land. In late 2018, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a series of rulings annulling the pipeline’s access to federal land and striking down a key permit. The next year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered an end to almost all construction. 

The project languished until the summer of 2022, when Manchin, a key Democratic senate vote who often challenges his party, made his support of Biden’s climate agenda contingent upon the pipeline’s completion. Last summer, he included a provision in the debt ceiling deal that effectively cleared away any remaining hurdles. A short time later, the Supreme Court lifted a stay on construction through a 3½-mile stretch through Jefferson National Forest. Crews returned to work with renewed vigor.

So too did the protestors. Morning after morning, week after week, pipeline workers clocked in only to find their work impeded: grannies locked to rocking chairs in the pipeline path, teenagers glued to construction equipment, worksites crowded by 20 to 30 people intent on stopping the day’s progress, more often than not, successfully. The campaign drew college students from nearby Roanoke, neighbors from across the mountains, seasoned organizers, and newer activists with little experience, all part of a near decade-long coalition, all activated by the pipeline’s anticipated completion, and many ready to face legal consequences for opposing it.

Jammie Hale is a bespectacled and bearded 51-year-old from Giles County, Virginia. Before he joined the campaign to stop the pipeline five and a half years ago, he was depressed and struggling with addiction. It didn’t help that the ruckus of construction invaded his waking and sleeping hours as it got closer and closer to his home, which lies within the 500-foot blast zone that could level his house in an explosion. “After a while, you hear all that, it kind of gets under your skin,” he said with a gentle intensity. “You build these angers up inside you, and how do you release these angers? Through self harm?” He became sleepless, consumed with visions of his family, and the land he plans to deed to his children, going up in flames.

When people began to organize, he and others in the community joined in. He found a will to live in the work. “I’m five years sober because of this project,”  Hale said. “Because, you know, I wanted to be useful.”

Hale attended permit hearings, tested water, and, when people started sitting in trees, hiked up the mountain to support them. He brought home-cooked meals, blankets, and supplies, and rallied on the forest floor to boost their morale. “I instantly fell in love with these people because they were just so badass,” Hale said. He and his neighbors began to take more concerted action, filming and peacefully confronting pipeline company surveyors who came unannounced to survey their land for construction. Eventually, he found himself engaging in civil disobedience, fully aware of the risks he faces.

Hale is among a growing number of protesters the Mountain Valley Pipeline company has targeted with injunctions, a potentially costly legal hassle that could lead to jail time for anyone found on a construction site. Local authorities are taking an increasingly dim view of folks like Hale and show little hesitation in pursuing them for even minor infractions as the company continues to seize their land through eminent domain. These days, Hale supports protestors from afar by making signs and sharing food, among other things. There’s still some risk, he says, but if he lands in a cell or a courtroom, so be it.

“I’m not scared,” he said. “It’s kind of strange that they’re trying to get people for trespassing when they are the ones that have been trespassing.” 

Another longtime pipeline fighter who goes by Larkin is no stranger to arrests, or to supporting people whose civil disobedience has landed them in court time and again. A soft-spoken health care worker from nearby Blacksburg, Virginia, Larkin, who is in her late 30s, has been fighting resource extraction in Appalachia since she was a teenager. She spent the better part of a decade marching onto dusty strip mines, locking herself to equipment, and demanding a federal ban on mountaintop-removal coal mining. Ten years ago, that energy shifted toward the region’s multiplying pipelines. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was proposed alongside the MVP; it met with similarly vehement opposition and eventually died amid mounting legal costs and project delays. In short, protest worked, Larkin said. 

With the Supreme Court green-lighting the MVP, it seems to Larkin and others that there’s only one thing left to do. That is, throw their bodies upon the gears, in hopes of at least slowing things down for one more day, every day, for as long as possible, by force if nothing else.

“We knew from the get-go that a chapter of the fight requiring an escalated level of resistance is going to come if folks have any hope in pushing back,” Larkin said. 

Despite the risks, Larkin, and many others, feel they are taking ownership of their future and their dignity. When we fight, they say, we win, and it’s better that fossil fuel companies know their encroachments won’t go unchallenged. Larkin also feels it will deter future projects like the MVP. Without organized opposition, she feels the whole regulatory system will continue to rubber-stamp permits until the ocean overtakes Washington. 

“Old men with no thought to the future are ruining things for all of us,” Larkin said. “It really is down to us to just be mad. And do it with our bodies and be in the way.”

She knows she’s never far from becoming a target of the Mountain Valley Pipeline company’s ire. Over the years, she’s seen friends locked up and beaten down at various protests, and sometimes it makes her feel old. After so long in the fight, her knees and back ache, and she can’t spend hours sitting on the floor painting banners like she used to. When she began this work, she burned herself out quickly, believing that the world would end if she didn’t give everything she had.  

“When it’s so obvious that the world is on fire, it does feel like you have to put it out on the table all at once,” she said. “Just like, ‘Why think about the future? We have no future,’ kind of thing. And here we are, eight years later in this fight.”  

Yet there are moments, even now, when the pipeline seems inevitable, when she feels the joy of having taken a stand, of having made lifelong friends, of having done the right thing.

“I freaking love to have daybreak on a new blockade that has gone up in the night,” Larkin said, smiling. “And I think the other thing that I love is that I have really met and built real relationships of trust and solidarity with neighbors, people in my community whom I wouldn’t have otherwise known.”  

The pace is fast and the emotions run hot right now, but the stakes have felt high for a long time, Larkin said. She’s watched friends get sick, both from burnout and from the environmental risks of living near extraction, and watched some die of environmental illnesses and illnesses of stress and poverty. When trying to pinpoint exactly how the fight has lasted so long, Larkin points to the constant influx of new activists, particularly energized young people from nearby towns and colleges, and from other, similar campaigns.  

One activist who goes by Gator had only just turned 18 and drifted north after a working-class childhood on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. He felt disconnected and adrift at a military high school, beset by a gnawing sense of climate apocalypse and a bleak future. “My home is disappearing,” he said bluntly. 

Gator found his way to the Weelaunee “Stop Cop City” occupation in Atlanta last summer. The connections he made there led him to the woods of Virginia and West Virginia, where he camped in the pipeline’s path and met people who shared his feelings of desperation and urgency.  

He felt himself cross a Rubicon of sorts during a stint in jail after his arrest at another demonstration. He spent several days locked up, not knowing how much time had passed and listening to guards mock the people around him. As he sat there on the cold, concrete bed, he knew there was no return to regular life, to regular expectations for himself.

“It used to be that you’d be like, ‘I want to keep my nose clean, because I have a chance of having a career and having, at least for me, and the people I love, a comfortable life,’” Gator said. “But even that is disappearing.” 

---

The atmosphere in Elliston was, like the movement itself, at once nervous and defiant. Like environmental justice advocates most everywhere, those standing up to the Mountain Valley Pipeline are facing ever greater restrictions on their protests and increasingly harsh punishment for their actions.

In September, Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC filed a lawsuit against more than 40 individuals and two organizations — Appalachians Against Pipelines and Rising Tide North America. The suit seeks more than $4 million in damages and a ruling prohibiting the defendants from accessing construction sites, planning demonstrations, or raising funds for protest activities. The company said it decided to sue because protestors endanger themselves and workers, and because they’re breaking the law. 

“If opponents were truly interested in environmental protection,” said MVP spokeswoman Natalie Cox, “they would have engaged with us to address their concerns through honest, open dialogue, which we respectfully offered on numerous occasions, rather than wasting agency resources and burdening the courts to support their myopic agendas.” Cox also blamed protesters for disrupting landowners and limiting the region’s economic opportunities.

Such lawsuits — which activists and their attorneys often call a strategic action against public participation — are usually filed by corporate or government entities against people who speak out on a matter of public concern. Those fighting the pipeline say the suit is intended to chill protest and intimidate them. Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC has been regularly adding defendants to the suit, often after identifying them near protests or reading their names in the news. Many protesters have been charged with felonies in recent months, all for blocking construction.

Despite a relative lack of trouble at the Peters Mountain lockdown — authorities arrested two people and quickly released them — the arraignment later that week proved more contentious. The two young activists were unexpectedly re-arrested and prosecutors slapped each of them with a felony kidnapping charge — presumably, protesters say, for asking construction workers to leave their vehicles — and held without bond. 

According to Appalachians Against Pipelines, another protester, who goes by Pine, turned themself in on a felony warrant; they were charged with kidnapping and theft for holding up a work vehicle. A judge set bail at $25,000. Another protester was sentenced to six months, with three of them suspended, for similar charges. They are free pending an appeal. 

“This system is seeking to doom us to a future that will not even exist,” Pine said in a statement. “However, there is solidarity everywhere . . . these ridiculous charges that I received do not make me afraid, since I know I do not stand alone.”

Fear of arrest and imprisonment remains a restless undercurrent for many activists, said a young organizer who gave only her first name, Coral. She stepped away from fighting pipelines on tribal land to answer a call for support in central Appalachia.

“I’ve been grappling with the repression piece a lot because it is working,” said Coral, who identifies as Indigenous but would not state her affiliation for fear that it might help identify her. For her, and many of those fighting alongside her, the effort to stop the pipeline is a commitment to protecting unceded Indigenous land, and to building a world free from old, colonial, and extractive social structures. That obligation weighs heavily on her, though. The killing of an environmental activist at an ongoing forest blockade in Atlanta and the ceaseless violence against Native land defenders worldwide is never far from her mind. “Our people were persecuted and killed for fighting for our land,” she said. 

And yet, despite it all, the pace of protest has increased since construction resumed. Few weeks go by without people locking themselves to equipment, blocking the pipeline route, or picketing banks that support the project and the company building it. Despite several frightening incidents, including one in which crews reportedly felled trees dangerously close to an activist, the blockades and lockdowns continue. The hope, many activists said, is to draw a critical mass of supporters to the region. The fight, they said, is far from over, and they hope to bring the same kind of energy sparked by the massive Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

In Elliston, as the crisp October day warmed, the crowd was as energized and raucous as ever, echoing demands that have evolved over decades of environmental organizing in central Appalachia. Many hands unfurled colorful banners connecting the fight against climate change to movements opposing war, genocide, incarceration, and the theft of Indigenous land. Before long, though, several police cars slowly rolled up the road from the main highway, blocking the group’s exit. As officers stepped from their cars and made their way up the hill, some protesters with children in tow began to worry about their safety but remained for the moment. 

As the police amassed, a young person of about 20, bundled in warm clothing and locked to an excavator, called down to the crowd. Their face couldn’t be seen, but their voice sounded small and very young. “I’m here because . . . these mountains are beautiful,” they called, laughing. “Appalachia is beautiful. This planet is beautiful!” Some in the crowd, though anxious, smiled at the voice speaking for them. The crowd held one another and swayed in the breeze as the drums started up again.

“The judge has had it up to here with y’all,” one exasperated police officer remarked as some in the group talked him down from arresting everyone in sight, mothers and children and all. Other officers took photos of license plates and threatened to increase their retaliation if they saw any of the cars at another protest.

When the group moved on to a neighboring plot owned by someone sympathetic to their cause, the police followed them, threatening to cite anyone who stuck around. Everyone knew that probably meant being added to MVP’s lawsuit. They decided to move along, but vowed to return another day.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the last-ditch effort to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline on Jan 16, 2024.

Puerto Rico has begun using batteries connected to residents’ rooftop solar panels to provide backup power for its grid, helping prevent blackouts and offering an alternative to fossil fuel-burning peaker plants. It could be the first step toward building one of the largest virtual power plants of its kind.

The yearlong pilot, launched late last year by Puerto Rico’s utility Luma Energy, will pull power from up to 6,500 households during energy shortages. It is part of a transformational effort to modernize a deteriorating grid and transition to clean energy. 

If the program is successful, it could lead to a much larger virtual power plant with the potential to make peaker plants, which run only when demand spikes, unnecessary. “It could be really significant,” said Ben Hertz-Shargel, a grid expert at the research firm Wood Mackenzie, adding that if it were expanded to include all home batteries on the island, it would be larger than any residential-storage virtual power plant in North America.  

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, are networks of distributed energy resources — like home batteries, electric water heaters, or heat pumps — that can help the grid. They can manage energy demand, such as by adjusting smart thermostats during peak hours. Some can also supply power to the grid, by drawing from home or even EV batteries.

The Department of Energy is promoting them as a way of addressing the anticipated growth in energy demand in the coming years. Many states, including Vermont, California, and Texas, already have at least one type of VPP running, but around 20 states have none. Tripling the country’s VPP capacity by 2030 could supply 10 to 20 percent of its peak demand by then. Doing so also could also save the U.S. as much as $10 billion annually by preventing the need to build new infrastructure or fire up peaker plants. 

“Why spend money on more natural gas peaker plants when VPPs will save all Americans $10 billion per year, and give the money to people who have already paid for smart water heaters, batteries, and other smart devices?” Jigar Shah, head of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, told Grist.

Puerto Rico is uniquely equipped for a residential-storage VPP, because nearly all of its rooftop solar arrays include at least one battery. After Hurricane Maria wiped out power across the archipelago in 2017, rooftop-solar adoption rates soared, and so did demand for energy storage. 

“Solar systems in Puerto Rico without batteries were not the product anymore,” Javier Rúa-Jovet, chief policy officer at the Puerto Rico Solar and Energy Storage Association told Grist. “It had to be with batteries because the driver was going to be resiliency.” 

More than 100,000 households now have rooftop solar, and the archipelago is installing about 4,000 new systems per month. Growth should speed up even more with the help of new federal funding programs, including an effort underway by the Energy Department to spend $500 million on systems for vulnerable households. 

All of those panels are already offsetting the archipelago’s power needs by about 600 megawatts — more than its largest coal-powered peaker power plant generates, according to Rúa-Jovet. Leveraging their batteries too could do even more. “It’s like Puerto Rico right now has an untapped, 500-megawatt clean-power peaker plant,” he said.

The pilot program, which hopes to enroll 6,500 customers, could provide about 26 megawatts of power. As of the end of December, nearly 2,000 households had enrolled, according to a Luma representative, representing 12.4 MW of capacity. 

Luma has tapped the VPP three times so far, including once last week. The frequency is expected to ramp up in the summer when temperatures get hotter. 

The program’s design addresses common fears about energy sharing and lingering mistrust of Luma and the government-run utility that preceded it. Customers can determine how much power they want to keep in their battery for their own reserve. They receive a notification before a dispatch occurs, and can opt-out of it if they want to keep their battery full. 

There is also a financial benefit for them — Luma is paying solar providers $1.25 per kilowatt-hour, and the companies split the revenue with their customers. Sonnen is offering enrollees a flat annual rate of $750 with a possible year-end bonus depending on how much the batteries are dispatched. Sunrun is paying customers $1 per kWh contributed. 

“That’s three times the value of net metering,” said Rúa-Jovet, referring to the compensation customers receive when they sell solar energy to the utility. “It can mean a free battery for someone in a 10-year window.” 

Hector Ríos lives with his wife in a two-bedroom house in Cabo Rojo on the southwestern corner of Puerto Rico’s main island. Electricity prices are “out of control,” he said, sometimes over $300 a month, and filling his diesel generator during blackouts cost about $25 per day. 

Last year, Ríos got a Sunrun rooftop solar system with a Tesla Powerwall battery. He enrolled in the energy-sharing pilot in November. “It sounds like a good idea, but I’ll be honest with you, I don’t fully understand the concept,” he told Grist. “An opportunity to make money by selling generation from your battery seemed too good to be true.”

Ríos was part of his first energy-sharing event in December. His battery was drawn down to about 20 percent, which was where he had set his minimum reserve. “It all seemed to go fine,” he said, but added that he might adjust how much power he keeps for himself. “I can change that at any point and would probably set it at 30 or 40, just to give myself a little more protection, and know that I could make it through the night if something happens.” 

The value proposition for Puerto Ricans goes beyond savings on their energy bill, said Rúa-Jovet. “I think it goes to Puerto Rican pride. We’re doing something groundbreaking, and you’re preventing blackouts for everyone.”

Blake Richetta, the CEO of battery manufacturer Sonnen USA, told Grist what’s happening in Puerto Rico is “a great first step, but it is literally a first step because we can do so much more.”

In Germany, where Sonnen is based, more than 144,000 of its home batteries automatically dispatch daily to help stabilize and bolster the grid in real time. Richetta said that with all of the enthusiasm around revolutionizing its energy system, Puerto Rico is primed for a similarly advanced system.

“They could have the real blueprint for energy transition,” he said. “The energy IQ of Puerto Rico is going really high, and people are ready to make this leapfrog forward.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Puerto Rico is using residents’ home batteries to back up its grid on Jan 16, 2024.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Hawai’i shut down its last coal plant on September 1, 2022, eliminating 180 megawatts of fossil-fueled baseload power from the grid on O’ahu — a crucial step in the state’s first-in-the-nation commitment to cease burning fossil fuels for electricity by 2045.

But the move posed a question that’s becoming increasingly urgent as clean energy surges across the United States: How do you maintain a reliable grid while switching from familiar fossil plants to a portfolio of small and large renewables that run off the vagaries of the weather?

Now Hawai’i has an answer: It’s a gigantic battery, unlike the gigantic batteries that have been built before.

The Kapolei Energy Storage system actually began commercial operations before Christmas on the industrial west side of O’ahu, according to Plus Power, the Houston-based firm that developed and owns the project. (The company just had the good sense to wait to announce it until journalists and readers had fully returned from winter holidays.)

Now, Kapolei’s 158 Tesla Megapacks are charging and discharging based on signals from utility Hawaiian Electric. The plant’s 185 megawatts of instantaneous discharge capacity match what the old coal plant could inject into the grid, though the batteries react far more quickly, with a 250-millisecond response time. Instead of generating power, they absorb it from the grid, ideally when it’s flush with renewable generation, and deliver that cheap, clean power back in the evening hours when it’s desperately needed.

“It feels incredible to be part of what Hawai’i and Hawaiian Electric are doing to get to 100 percent renewable energy and to play this enabling role to help them get one step closer,” Plus Power executive chair Brandon Keefe told Canary Media.

The construction process had its setbacks, as did the broader effort to replace the coal plant with a roster of large-scale clean energy projects. The Kapolei battery was initially intended to come online before the coal plant retired. COVID disrupted deliveries for the grid battery industry across the board, and Kapolei’s remote location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean didn’t make things easier. By summer 2021, Plus Power was hoping to complete Kapolei by the end of 2022, but it ended up taking another year. Even then, it has joined the grid before several of the other large solar and battery projects slated to replace the coal plant’s production with clean power.

Batteries replace key coal plant functions

Grid batteries operate in a fundamentally different way than coal plants, so Hawaiian Electric and Plus Power crafted a new framework to replace what needed to be replaced. The old coal generator provided three key values to O’ahu, Keefe explained: energy (the bulk volume of electricity), capacity (the instantaneous delivery of power on command), and grid services (stabilizing functions for the grid, wonky but vital to keeping the lights on).

The battery directly replaces the latter two: It matches the coal plant’s maximum power output (or ​“nameplate capacity,” in industry parlance), and it is programmed to deliver the necessary grid services that keep the grid operating in the right parameters. The grid runs within a certain frequency, but events can cause the frequency to stray out of bounds, say if another power plant trips offline or a sudden rush of solar production outstrips consumption. The Kapolei project provides a first line of defense, called ​“synthetic inertia,” responding to and correcting grid deviations in real time. If the situation continues to deteriorate past a specified threshold, the battery’s fast frequency response kicks in as a second line of defense.

With 565 megawatt-hours of storage, the battery can’t directly replace the coal plant’s energy production, but it works with the island’s bustling solar sector to fill that role. ​“We’re enabling the grid to add more clean renewable energy to the system to replace the energy from the coal plant,” Keefe said.

Hawaiian Electric’s modeling suggests it can reduce curtailment of renewables by an estimated 69 percent for the first five years thanks to Kapolei Energy Storage, allowing surplus clean electricity that would otherwise go to waste to get onto the grid.

The utility also requested ​“black-start capability.” If a disaster, like a cyclone or earthquake, knocks out the grid completely, Hawaiian Electric needs a power source to restart it. The Kapolei batteries are programmed to hold some energy in reserve for that purpose. Plus Power located the project near a substation connected to three other power plants so the battery ​“can be AAA to jump-start those other plants,” Keefe said.

The combination of all these abilities in one site — capacity, grid services, black start — leads Keefe to call Kapolei ​“the most advanced battery energy storage facility on the planet.”

Model for a reliable clean-energy grid

The new battery is just the latest dispatch from Hawai’i’s long-held spot at the vanguard of the energy transition. This is the state that hit mass rooftop solar adoption first and crafted the first utility-scale solar-battery plant in Kauai. (Not coincidentally, Plus Power CCO Bob Rudd had a hand in that project during his tenure at Tesla.)

But when renewables growth and fossil-plant retirements pass a certain threshold, as they have in Hawai’i, simply adding more wind, solar, or batteries isn’t sufficient. The clean technologies, which run on digitally controlled inverters, have to start maintaining the grid, not just feeding it.

Plenty of other batteries provide frequency services to other grids, and a few of them are larger than Kapolei. But this is the only large-scale battery that we’ve seen capable of combining the basic peak capacity, frequency response, synthetic inertia, and grid-rebooting tasks. That’s because Kapolei plays a more central role in its grid than battery plants do elsewhere.

After years of construction, California’s grid battery fleet surpassed 5,000 megawatts installed last year, but that only equates to 7.6 percent of the mammoth nameplate capacity of the state’s grid. Kapolei alone constitutes about 17 percent of Oahu’s peak capacity. Hawaiian Electric needed it to take on more responsibility than batteries elsewhere have ever had to.

Take inertia, which stabilizes grid frequency, as one example. Old plants provide this passively, through the spinning mass of their turbines; inertia didn’t need to be defined and compensated for separately in bygone decades because it was part of the package of running a power plant.

Now, across the country, the grid is moving to a model of maximizing cheap renewables when they are available and burning fuel when renewables aren’t. But the thermal plants need to be spinning to provide inertia — sometimes, on the mainland, renewables get curtailed to keep old coal plants running so they can deliver these grid services, Keefe said. This can be a bad deal for electricity customers, not to mention the climate.

Advanced batteries provide a synthetic version of this inertia through savvy programming of their inverters. This offers a more economic alternative while avoiding unnecessary carbon emissions. They also are faster and more precise — Keefe likened the Kapolei battery to a zippy electric sports car compared to the lumbering diesel bus of old thermal plants. That makes batteries a good technical fit for grids that are becoming increasingly volatile due to the fluctuations of renewable production.

Longer-term, U.S. climate goals require a phaseout of fossil fuels from the electric grid. Hydropower and nuclear plants help deliver valuable grid inertia without carbon emissions, but they aren’t on track to grow.

That’s why this project matters to the clean energy shift everywhere: It’s one of the first real-life examples of how to shift critical grid functions from fossil-fueled plants to clean energy plants. And eventually, the kind of grid services Kapolei has pioneered will have to scale nationwide.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A huge battery has replaced Hawaii’s last coal plant on Jan 15, 2024.

This story was originally published by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action, and Capital B, a nonprofit news organization that centers Black voices, audience needs and experiences, and partners with the communities it serves.

Former Florida state Rep. Joe Gibbons sat in the library of the Faith Community Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, trying to convince its pastor to quit promoting rooftop solar.

With a lobbyist’s charm, Gibbons told the Rev. Nelson Johnson that rooftop solar, which allows customers to generate their own renewable electricity, was bad for people of color. Gibbons argued that it creates an imbalance in which those without solar panels end up subsidizing those who have them, Johnson recalled in an interview with Floodlight. 

Johnson, a civil rights stalwart who was stabbed by a member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1979, had trouble believing him.

“It felt like he was an employee of Duke,” Johnson said of Gibbons, referencing his state’s power company. Johnson rejected the overture.

At the time Gibbons met Johnson in 2015, Duke Energy was opposing a state bill that would have allowed anyone to install solar panels and sell electricity directly to consumers. Johnson was at the center of a legal battle over just such a third-party solar project planned for his church.

Gibbons wasn’t a Duke employee — not directly anyway. He founded a tax-exempt group called the Energy Equity Alliance; little information about its finances are available. But it was closely aligned — through two board members and Gibbons’ wife, Ava Parker — with NetCommunications, a Black-owned consulting firm. That year, NetCommunications was paid $750,000 by the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a powerful utility trade group to which Duke belongs, for “consulting.” Duke did not respond to requests for comment.

Gibbons denied receiving funding from any utility in an interview with Floodlight and Capital B. But tax records and leaked internal documents confirm that a separate tax-exempt group he founded in 2018 received $2.8 million from a network of tax-exempt groups controlled by power company consultants. He later declined to answer specific questions about his industry ties.

Johnson wasn’t the only Black leader Gibbons pitched, according to recordings of his public statements. More than two dozen Black civil rights leaders in the Southeast have been high-value targets in power companies’ battle for market dominance, courted and at times even co-opted by the industry, according to an investigation by Floodlight and Capital B.

The multibillion-dollar power companies use Black support to divert attention from the environmental harms that spew from their fossil fuel plants, the investigation found, harms which disproportionately fall on Black communities. One civil rights leader  received power company cash as he built support for its attempted takeover of a smaller municipal utility in Florida. Another fought state oversight in Alabama that could have lowered electric bills and federal oversight that could have restricted emissions and pollution from coal burning power plants.

Some civil rights and faith leaders “will sell you out because they’ll sell anything — they’ll sell sea water,” said the Rev. Michael Malcom, executive director of the environmental justice organization Alabama Interfaith Power & Light in Birmingham. 

“But there are others who are earnest and trying to survive … and it causes them to make some bad decisions. And there is a whole ‘nother group that is just ignorant to the idea [of environmental justice] and will sell you out due to that ignorance.”

How valuable was this tie between Southern utility companies and civil rights groups? In 2018, Alabama Power was paying a contractor nearly $1.5 million a year to, among other things, “provide ongoing direct relations” with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group founded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., according to a leaked copy of the contract.

Stealth effort targets renewable energy

Gibbons’ 2015 conversation with Johnson was part of a broader campaign implemented by trade group EEI to slow technologies such as rooftop solar.

Edison Electric Institute spokesperson Brian Reil defended his organization’s actions, saying they are aimed at protecting low-income ratepayers. 

“EEI has no issue with rooftop solar,” Reil said in a written statement. “EEI has an issue with poorly designed … policies that overcompensate private rooftop solar system owners at the expense of other customers.”

He cited a new study by the National Academy of Sciences which found that the price of electricity remains relatively stable when the adoption of rooftop solar panels is low — currently just 1 percent nationwide and below 5 percent in all but four states — but it may rise as participation rates grow.

Consultants working for the powerful industry trade group were behind the formation of Gibbons’ organization. 

On a leaked 2014 EEI conference call, an employee of consulting firm NetCommunications teased a forthcoming report to be published by the Energy Equity Alliance, a tax-exempt group that appears to not have been incorporated yet. The group was formed a month later in Florida with Gibbons as its director. During his four years at its helm, Gibbons lobbied for restrictions on rooftop solar in South Carolina, rallied Black federal legislators against the technology, and traveled the country “educating” ministers and civil rights leaders about rooftop solar. 

And in 2018, Gibbons was working with Floridians for Affordable Reliable Energy, the tax-exempt group that got $2.8 million from groups operated by Alabama-based power company consultants Matrix LLC. In that effort, Gibbons whipped up opposition among Florida civil rights groups to a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into Florida’s monopoly energy markets. 

Floridians for Affordable Reliable Energy filed a friend of the court brief with the Florida Supreme Court arguing the measure would “significantly increase electricity costs for seniors, low income households, minority communities, average citizens and small businesses in Florida.” 

Several chapters of The Urban League, a civil rights group, also signed on with Gibbons. Richard Danford, the president of Jacksonville’s Urban League chapter, says Gibbons was instrumental in securing funding for the chapter when it was struggling in 2019. The court ultimately struck the amendment down, finding its language confusing. 

In a terse interview, Gibbons confirmed he “did some energy stuff” and “got involved with different advocacy groups.” And he says he still stands by the utility-aligned policies he advocated.

Utilities tap consulting companies

The joint investigation found that since at least 2009, consulting companies have worked on behalf of major power companies seeking to influence Black leaders and their organizations. They worked primarily through 501(c) 4 organizations, tax-exempt groups that are allowed to engage in political activity. 

Two of the nation’s largest power companies, NextEra Energy and Southern Company, employed Matrix LLC, whose tactics included secretly funneling money to news sites that attacked clean energy proponents, surveilling a journalist who wrote critically about FPL and employing a corporate operative posing as a reporter to rattle political opponents. 

Matrix’s founder, Joe Perkins, has maintained that its former CEO, Jeff Pitts, was a “rogue employee” who performed much of the work without Perkins’ knowledge. In court filings, Pitts has alleged that his boss was aware and has accused Perkins of wrongdoing. Neither responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Entities controlled by Matrix paid $115,000 to Charles Steele Jr, the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and about $170,000 to Rev. Deves Toon, national field director for the National Action Network (NAN), according to verified internal Matrix documents and tax records.

The SCLC was a desegregation pioneer in the South and active in the first protests against environmental racism. NAN, founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton, spotlights violence faced by people of color. In 2023, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the leader of the Environmental Protection Agency spoke at NAN events. 

In an interview last year, Steele confirmed one payment from Matrix but categorized it as a contribution for civil rights work. Neither he nor his organization responded to additional questions. Toon did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

As he received the payments, NAN’s Toon built support for NextEra subsidiary Florida Power & Light’s attempted takeover of a smaller public utility in Florida. His actions on behalf of Matrix have prompted questions from the FBI, according to two people interviewed by investigators, the news outlets’ joint investigation found. NextEra Energy did not respond to requests for comment.

Steele, the SCLC head, fought state utility oversight in Alabama. And he advocated for less federal oversight that could have restricted emissions from Alabama Power’s coal-burning power plants and pollution from its toxic coal-ash ponds.

‘We spread money all over the Southeast’

Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning, who retired last year, confirmed in a May interview with Floodlight that the company still worked with Matrix and with civil rights groups including the SCLC. The company did not respond to later requests for comment.

“There’s a real business reason why we do this,” he said, claiming a mutual benefit for the company and the civil rights groups. 

In an earlier interview with Floodlight, Fanning said the company’s related charitable foundations used their $600 million in assets to “spread money all over the Southeast. … we make it a point to be invested in the communities.”

At least one venerable civil rights organization — the NAACP — urged its local chapters to stop taking power company money in 2020 after an internal struggle sparked by donations from Florida Power & Light. But big dollar corporate sponsorship can be hard to resist as such donations are hard to come by for social justice nonprofits, according to an analysis by CauseIQ, which provides information to companies that fund the nonprofit sector.

Power company money and attention helps to fill the financial void many civil rights groups experience, and in turn, gives utilities a trusted community leader to advocate for them on lucrative policy positions, according to interviews with a dozen Black political operatives, community organizers and consultants. 

David Pellow, director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says the payments represent “the cold, hard, brutal” facts that power companies “need to maintain (public) support for what they’re doing.”

A “really effective way” of controlling the narrative in favor of utilities, Pellow said, has been “buying off people in communities who have a vested interest in fighting those companies.” 

Jasmen Rogers, a Black political strategist in Florida, says the money exchange lays bare the sometimes difficult concessions Black leaders make to help fund their work. 

“If Black folks are finding that they can’t get funding from other, better places as easily as other people, how do we reconcile that?” she said.

Esther Calhoun of Uniontown, Alabama, says she is leery of civil rights groups and leaders who take money from utility companies. 

Calhoun says she often has to choose between her electric bill, medicine or food. Alabama residents spend more on electric bills than any other state.

“It’s gotten to be where if you’re on a fixed income, there ain’t no way you can pay,” said the 60-year-old, whose monthly utility bill for her small mobile home is $220.

For a time, Calhoun also had to battle a defamation lawsuit filed by the operators of a toxic coal ash dump at a local landfill. The parties settled in 2017, with the landfill operators agreeing to enact better pollution controls. 

When civil rights groups take money from industry, she said in an interview, “They don’t speak out, and they end up being on the other side of what they originally said — that’s what corruption gets you.”

Opposition fades as utility support grows

In the past, the SCLC pushed back against Alabama Power, boycotting it for supporting apartheid-era South Africa in 1965. In the early ’80s, the group led the nation’s burgeoning environmental justice movement.

But by the early 2000s, SCLC was in turmoil, facing bankruptcy and internal discord. Steele assumed the presidency 20 years ago, attracting corporate donors. Among them was Georgia Power — Alabama Power’s affiliate — which helped raise $2 million for a new SCLC office.

Five years later, Steele left to become a consultant. He co-founded Working People for Fair Energy, a tax-exempt group, alongside a Matrix employee, according to tax and divorce records. 

The group fought regulations on toxic coal ash, a waste product caused by coal-burning power plants. In 2010, Steele received $105,000 from the Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy (PACE), a Matrix-controlled tax-exempt group that helped power companies fight rooftop solar. 

In 2012, Steele returned as SCLC president. Over the next five years, he opposed rooftop solar expansion in Arizona, resisted lowering Alabama utility bills, and criticized a federal plan to reduce power plant greenhouse gas emissions. 

“My job was to make money for the organization (SCLC),” Steele said in an interview with Floodlight in July.

Perkins, the Matrix founder, told Floodlight in a July 2022 written statement that the assertion that Matrix had “deployed” groups to advocate for certain positions or that these were “front groups” for Matrix is “untrue and offensive.” But it was Perkins himself who, as of 2018, was earning nearly $1.5 million a year from Alabama Power to maintain the company’s relationship with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and for other services. 

As of 2022, Alabama Power continued to financially support the SCLC. A corporate relations officer for the company spoke at the SCLC annual gala that year. “I want to say thank you, thank you to Dr. Steele for allowing us to be partners,” she said. 

Takeover bid sparks federal inquiry

Angie Nixon remembers the December evening in 2017 when some 20 residents from Jacksonville, Florida’s Black neighborhoods convened at a community center to express frustration over rates charged by the Jacksonville Electric Authority (JEA), their municipal utility. 

The meeting was organized by a group called Fix JEA Now, where she was a director. Toon, national field director for Sharpton’s NAN, was its leader. 

Fix JEA Now blamed the municipal utility for buying a stake in a nearby nuclear power station, “resulting in higher prices for customers and valuable dollars flushed down the drain,” according to its defunct website.

But Nixon says she was unaware of Toon’s agenda. By February 2018, he was calling for the sale of the municipal utility to Florida Power & Light, according to email messages shared by Nixon. Nixon, who is now a state representative, was for fixing the municipal power company — but not privatizing it, which could have raised rates. She says she felt duped and quit.

While running Fix JEA now, Toon received about $170,000 from Matrix. He also offered a sitting Jacksonville City Commissioner who was a likely no vote on the utility sale a $250,000 job with a tax-exempt group run by Matrix, according to reporting from the Orlando Sentinel. 

Garret Dennis, the commissioner, said Toon made the job offer through Dwight Brisbane, who worked for Fix JEA Now. Dennis remembers becoming suspicious after researching the tax-exempt group, named Grow United, and finding little information available.

The episode prompted inquiries from the FBI, which interviewed both men in 2022, specifically asking Brisbane about his connections to Matrix. The FBI declined to comment. The sale of JEA was ultimately voted down by Jacksonville’s commissioners.

Brisbane says his motives for working at the organization were driven by concern for the community. In February of this year, the utility passed a 175 percent increase to its basic monthly charge and recently proposed another to pay for service improvements and stabilize its debt.

“It falls on deaf ears, man, nobody cares,” said Brisbane. “Those who have to pay for it are like my mom, who’s 75 years old … and on a fixed income, or disabled people.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Power companies paid civil rights leaders in the South. They became loyal industry advocates. on Jan 14, 2024.