A Thing to Think About That Isn't That Thing

Solar balconies are the energy equivalent of puppy pictures

As many of you know, I’ve spent the last months of my life working on that Other Thing. I’m actually spending today with many of my Third Act colleagues phonebanking in an effort to…No, I’m not going to say it. Too much. So in case you need a twenty-minute break from your own efforts to avert…No, I’m not going to say it. Here’s something nice to think about, the energy equivalent of pictures of golden retrievers pouring out of a kennel to lick your face.

What we’re talking about is what the Germans call a balconkraftwerk, or Balcony Energy Plant. I wrote about it earlier in 2024, but a refresher: we’re talking small solar panels that you hang off your balcony and plug into your house, where they provide power. Not huge amounts of power, like solar panels on your roof, or the battery in your EV. But enough power to run a router or a small fridge.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany—and much of the EU—did all sorts of things to boost renewable energy. One of the small but symbolic ones was relax the regulations for putting up these small solar systems. Basically, you just go to the German equivalent of Home Depot and buy one and put it up. No electrician, no paperwork. According to Grist they cost about $500, complete with inverter; for a little more you can get a small battery to store your afternoon’s sun for evening use. Since half of Germans live in apartments, they’ve become incredibly popular

“I love the feeling of charging the bike when the sun is shining, or having the washing machine run when the sun is shining, and to know that it comes directly from the sun,” one tenant said. “It’s a small step you can take as a tenant” and an act of “self-efficacy, to not just sit and wait until the climate crisis gets worse.”

In fact, they’re so popular that German cities are now passing laws making it impossible for landlords to block the installations, and providing subsidies to spur their spread. These small solar panels are spreading across Europe, and so every day new products appear—here’s an example from last week. It’s written in the same language as any other consumer product, except that in this case it’s part of the most important revolution in human affairs in our lifetime.

One of the concerns about balcony solar system has been the cost and payback period, especially when storage is involved. BigBlue addresses these issues head-on by offering an affordable solution that does not compromise much on quality or performance. With a reduced cost & super early bird promotion from €459, the payback period of the new POWAFREE H3/H4 is notably favorable, allowing users to recoup their investment quickly through significant energy savings and reduced electricity bills.

There’s finally been a little coverage in the U.S.—here’s a good story in the Times—but almost all of it avoids asking the obvious question: can I do this here? And the answer, basically, is no: installing solar in the U.S. requires complying with an insane welter of state and local regulations. This is a huge problem for rooftop solar—it costs about $3.50 a watt to put up a system in America, compared with under a dollar in Australia or most of Europe, simply because of the paperwork and permitting. But it’s even a problem for this kind of thing, which poses no real danger. I mean, ask yourself: who are the most rules-bound people on earth? I’d vote for Germans. If these things were actually dangerous—well, they’ve conducted a giant real-world study for us.

But check out this Reddit thread about the basic impossibility of doing this here. Or this daunting list of technical requirements for Americans. Here’s the leader of GismoPower explaining the current situation

Plug-in solar in the United States does not yet legally exist, and there are no related codes or standards established yet. Why?

Every state in the nation is contending with regulatory inconsistencies due in part to differing regulations set by local AHJ’s or utilities and the absence of a unified federal law, leaving the U.S. trailing behind in Plug-and-Play Solar adoption.

The good news is, amidst these challenges, the Department of Energy has revived its commitment to developing a new UL-Standard for Plug-In PV systems. This represents a significant step forward, acknowledging the untapped potential for renewable generation, particularly for disadvantaged and underserved communities, those with inadequate roofing for traditional solar panels, and renters.

So maybe if we elected someone who liked renewable…no, forget about it. We’re not talking about that Thing. We’re just working on it. Back to the phone. With one more picture to make you happy, in a Teutonic sort of way.

In other energy and climate news:

+As we approach this year’s global climate talks—which will be in the oil-soaked Eastern European capital of Baku—the major international agencies are all issuing their annual updates. The World Meteorological Organization reports that once again greenhouse gas emissions have surged.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide — the most important driver of global warming — are now growing faster than at any time since our species evolved, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. The increase can be traced back to stubbornly high rates of fossil fuel consumption, the report said, as well as ecosystems that are becoming more likely to produce emissions and potentially less capable of absorbing excess carbon.

Levels of the potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide also hit all-time highs in 2023, the WMO said. The total heat-trapping potential of the atmosphere is now 51.5 percent higher than in 1990, when United Nations scientists first warned the world was on track for catastrophic climate change.

Meanwhile, the leading British medical journal, the Lancet, reports that deaths from heat are at record levels.

“The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts, and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far and put a healthy future further out of reach.”

The report finds that in 2023, extreme drought lasting at least one month affected 48% of the global land area, while people had to cope with an unprecedented 50 more days of health-threatening temperatures than would have been expected without the climate crisis. As a result, 151 million more people faced moderate or severe food insecurity, risking malnutrition and other harm to their health.

Heat related deaths among the over-65s rocketed by 167% in 2023, compared with the 1990s. Without the climate crisis, an ageing global population means such deaths would have increased, but only by 65%. High temperatures also led to a record 6% more hours of lost sleep in 2023 than the 1986–2005 average. Poor sleep has a profound negative effect on physical and mental health.

+It’s not just the (mighty!) Dodgers. I’ve been covering the effort to get the World Series champs to break their ties with the oil industry, but Eliot Negin reports that it’s a sports-wide problem—and just like politicians, it’s easier to get sports execs to make promises about their own carbon footprints than deal with their longstanding relationships with Big Oil

In September, North American professional sports leagues had the opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to protecting the planet during a joint panel at Climate Week NYC, the annual affair cosponsored by the United Nations featuring hundreds of events feting local, national and international efforts to address climate change.

They dropped the ball.

Just three months earlier, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres castigated coal, oil and gas companies—which he dubbed the “godfathers of climate chaos”—for spreading disinformation and called for a worldwide ban on fossil fuel advertising. Until that happens, Guterres urged ad agencies to refuse fossil fuel clients and companies to stop taking their ads.

The leagues apparently didn’t get the memo. During their panel discussion, titled Major League Greening, representatives from pro baseball (MLB), basketball (NBA) and hockey mainly talked about their long-term goals to shrink their carbon footprint and, to be sure, they have come a long way since I wrote about their initial efforts to reduce their energy, water and paper use back in 2012. They also talked about their budding alliances with climate solution experts. But there was no talk of cutting their commercial ties with the very companies that are largely responsible for the climate crisis.

A recent survey of pro baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer leagues by UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment found that they collectively have more than 60 sponsorship deals with three dozen oil companies and utilities that burn fossil fuels or distribute fossil gas. Depending on the deal, the companies get prominently placed billboards in team facilities, logos on team uniforms, partnerships with team community programs, or—if they spend some serious money—stadium naming rights.

+It’s always good to see one’s intuitions validated in black and white! As readers of this newsletter know, I spend much of my time working with older Americans via Third Act for action on climate and democracy. (We’ve got thousands of volunteers in the field these last two days working on you know what). Olivia Rudgard, writing in Bloomberg, makes the case that Boomers are now at the forefront of the climate fight.

Ever since Greta Thunberg burst onto the scene in 2018, climate protest has been seen as a primarily youthful pursuit. Not only do younger people have the chutzpah to storm public spaces and tussle with police, they are arguably the cohort most impacted by systems they had no part in creating. In 2050 — the global deadline for net zero and the point by which warming is expected to graze 2C — many Baby Boomers will be out of the picture. Millennials will be reaching their own golden years, while today’s teenagers will be in their prime. It’s common to hear that the next generation will solve problems that today’s leaders couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

A growing group of climate retirees are countering that narrative. They’re playing a major role in protesting fossil fuel expansion, exhorting their contemporaries to vote with the climate in mind, and even taking part in the most confrontational types of protest.

Many modern climate movements have far more age variety than people might think, says Graeme Hayes, a sociologist at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, who has co-authored demographic analyses of Britain’s climate activism. “One thing that really came across to us was the idea of being a parent, or the idea of being a grandparent, and that being a really important motivating force in why they were taking action,” Hayes says.

+Readers will also know I’ve mentioned several times the argument that Brett Christophers has been making this year—essentially that renewable energy is so cheap that the profit motive alone won’t spread it fast enough. If you take in information more easily via video, here he is in discussion with Adam Tooze.

+As renewables spread, there are more hours every day when electricity is free in places that charge in real time. British utilities are experimenting with ways to encourage customers to take full advantage. As Somini Sengupta explains:

Martin and Laura Bradley live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October.

The Bradleys plugged in their electric Kia, started a load of laundry and set to work on their most delectable energy-guzzling project: the Christmas fruitcake, which is made weeks in advance of the holidays. “As this takes four hours to cook in my electric oven, this is the perfect timing!” Laura Bradley said.

The phone alerts to the Bradleys and thousands of other people are part of Britain’s ambitious plan to shift the nation’s electricity system away from burning fossil fuels altogether by decade’s end. That would be five years faster than the United States, and a full decade ahead of the European Union, effectively making it the most ambitious target of any major industrialized economy.

+If I’m reading this report from Spain correctly, they’ve figured out how to use the breeze from HVAC systems on buildings to generate windpowered electricity

The case study examines a data center in Colombia. It features three Liebert HPC-M chillers, each equipped with eight EC-FAN fans. These fans, operating at 480 V and 900 rpm, provide constant vertical airflow to cool the facility’s computer equipment.

Two chillers run continuously, while the third is on standby and rotates weekly. The fans, with 900 mm blades and 2.4 kW power, expel heat to maintain ideal operating temperatures, ensuring efficient 24/7 data center operations.

According to researchers, a variety of horizontal and vertical-axis small wind turbines exist, but the consistent wind direction observed from the chiller’s equipment, coupled with environmental turbulence, leads to the choice of a vertical-axis wind turbine.

+Lots of retirees move to the ocean shore. A new AARP report shows that rising sea levels and nastier storms are wrecking those dreams

And increasingly, the people in harm’s way are older. Between 1970 and 2022, the number of people over 65 living in counties along the country’s East, West, Gulf and Great Lakes coasts rose 159 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of younger people living in those areas actually dropped.

Water doesn’t discriminate by age, of course. In the devastating floods that hit Southern California in February — caused by a record-setting “atmospheric river” of rain — people of all ages lost power, lost their homes. Nine lost their lives. But the impact of flooding specifically on older people is “often underappreciated,” says Anamaria Bukvic, a Virginia Tech assistant professor who studies that impact. Even minor floods can be disastrous for this population, preventing access to food, medicine or emergency care; shutting off power, heat or air-conditioning; or draining limited savings. People with mobility or cognitive issues may live in dwellings not designed for big floods. Some people can’t — or won’t — evacuate. If they do, relocation may trigger anxiety and loneliness.

“Their whole world is often right in their home — that’s their whole life,” says Erin McLeod, who runs Senior Friendship Centers in Southwest Florida. “And they wonder: If they leave, will they be able to get back? Will that home still be there?”

Meanwhile, a new study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that 3.2 million Americans were displaced by weather disaster last year

People of color, sexual and gender minority populations, and those with lower incomes, disabilities, or unfavorable social determinants of health (SDOH) such as food insecurity were more likely to report displacement. Long-term displacement was more common with fires compared with other disasters. Disaster impacts, including food and water shortage, electricity loss, unsanitary conditions, feeling isolated, and experiencing scams, were more common among people of color and individuals with lower education or income.

+Besides pouring ungodly sums into that thing we’re not talking about, Silicon Valley elites have also been busy planning for geoengineering projects acording to a new Bloomberg report

A growing number of Silicon Valley founders and investors are backing research into blocking the sun by spraying reflective particles high in the atmosphere or making clouds brighter. The goal is to quickly cool the planet.

A couple of startups are already trying to deploy this untested technology or betting governments will eventually use it, while a cluster of Bay Area nonprofits are backing research into its planetary impact. With the world hotter than at any point in human history and emissions showing no sign of falling, the pitch is that dimming the sun is a relatively cheap way to turn the heat down.

“To get started it only takes one person to say, ‘I have 100 million quid, I have a business jet, let’s go,’” said Andrew Lockley, a UK-based independent researcher in the field scientists call geoengineering. “History will judge whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

+Many Californians have signed an open letter calling on the state’s pension funds to take on Exxon more directly. One thing driving this effort: Exxon is trying to sell bonds with a maturity date of 2074, a stark reminder that all this talk about net zero by 2050 is, um, talk.

+Mongabay has the goods on a particularly dubious plan to cut down Indonesian rainforest for “biomass^.”

Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most-populous country and a top greenhouse gas emitter, with nearly half its energy coming from coal.

As the nation strives to make good on its pledges to cut fossil fuels, President Joko Widodo has promoted biomass energy, derived from burning plant and animal products, as a sustainable alternative. His administration, whose term came to an end on Oct. 20, has set ambitious targets to increase the burning of biomass alongside coal in power plants, a method known as cofiring, which is used extensively in Japan and South Korea.

PT Malinau Hijau Lestari (MHL), the company seeking to operate in Ipu’s village, Laban Nyarit, is one of many firms in Indonesia lining up to establish plantations of fast-growing tree species to produce wood pellets as biomass, classified by the government as a form of renewable energy. Indonesia’s wood pellets are slated for both domestic use and export to other countries.

Fears abound, however, that Indonesia’s biomass drive might come at the expense of its abundant but dwindling rainforests. A 2022 analysis by clean energy think tank Trend Asia concluded that meeting the government’s target to increase the portion of biomass burned in coal plants to 10% would require clearing at least 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of natural forest, an area twice the size of the island of Bali, in order to free up land for new plantations.

+Canada, too, is getting in on the fun of jailing nonviolent climate protesters for punitively long periods. Here’s an appeal to help with one case—if your French is as bad as mine, read down for the English

+New York City is underlain by a network of ancient brooks that mostly show up now when leaking mains pump water down their buried courses. But Emily Raboteau has a lovely and hopeful piece about “daylighting” one of these watercourses in the Bronx.

Daylighting Tibbetts Brook is one of the city’s most ambitious green infrastructure projects to date. It will cost $133 million to restore the waterway along a new route that won’t disturb the neighborhood’s structures, including our house. That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s a bargain compared to the high price of sewer and stormwater overflows when cloudbursts drop their heavy payloads. On dry days, four to five million gallons of freshwater flow from the brook into the sewer, ushering our filth and concentrated street runoff down to the Wards Island wastewater treatment plant. But when we get rain bombs, the volume of water is way too much for that system to process and spills unfiltered into the Harlem River, further contaminating the ecosystem, sickening all it touches. Daylighting will abate combined sewage overflow, extend greenspace, absorb heat, and relieve chronic flooding in our area’s janky, archaic drainage system, in an act of climate mitigation and as a community effort to solve a mess caused by old crimes.

+Big shoutout to my beloved home, Middlebury College, which, as CleanTechnica points out, is forging ahead with solar power while other institutions are “dithering.” It even includes a nifty little dig at our chief rival, Dartmouth!

There’s a message here. If you want your children to be educated, send them to Middlebury College. If you want them to be brainwashed by messages paid for by fossil fuel companies, send them to that other New England college located in New Hampshire where one of the most prominent buildings on campus is the Irving Institute, founded by a principal owner of Irving Oil.

Similarly, I’m so proud to be a small part of Dayenu, which organizes American Jewry for action on climate. (I’m the token Methodist). The Times carried a beautiful account of their work this week.

Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the group’s founder and chief executive, said the name holds dual messages: “We’ve had enough” of the climate crisis, and “we have enough” to address it. The group, which says it has tens of thousands of members and social media followers, runs dozens of branches in synagogues, college campuses and other communities and is partnering with other climate and faith groups.

“Enough” has also been the cry of Jews on both sides of an often-tense divide over the Israel-Gaza war this past year. Younger Jewish voters are particularly split over Israel’s response to Hamas Oct. 7, 2023 attack, in which more than 1,200 people in Israel were killed and 250 taken hostage. The Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians.

Dayenu is hoping that Jewish Americans can find common ground in the fight against global warming.

+Progress in Atlantic offshore wind has been…lumpy. But some good news from Maine this week, where a big auction went better than expected. As Emily Pontecorvo writes:

Two developers, Avangrid and Invenergy, purchased four of the eight leases that were up for sale. If turned into wind farms, they have the potential to generate about 6.8 gigawatts, or enough electricity to power about 2.3 million homes, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Compared with the optimism on display just two years ago, when more than a dozen companies competed in a three-day bidding war for the right to develop six areas off the coast of New York and New Jersey, Tuesday’s sale was a flop. Just two companies participated. The bidding closed after one round. The leases sold for a flat $50 per acre, compared to an average of nearly $9,000 per acre in the New York sale.

But put in context of how things are going in 2024, it’s a miracle anyone showed up at all. The offshore wind industry has been struggling with supply chain issues and inflation, not to mention increasing opposition from coastal communities. Just a month ago, an offshore wind lease sale off the coast of Oregon was canceled after the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management learned that there was only one interested party. The agency also canceled an auction for the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year citing a lack of interest.

+Veteran Ukraine reporter Tim Mak reports that the country is testing out a new ecocide theory in the international courts

The explosion of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam is the largest man-made disaster in Europe in recent decades. The Russians blew it up around 3 a.m. on June 6, 2023, while Ukrainians were still sleeping. Dozens of people and tens of thousands of animals died as a result. 

The Kherson region, where the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant was located, used to grow about 80% of all vegetables in Ukraine. Now farming in much of the area is impossible, because it is deprived of irrigation. 

In addition, the Kakhovka dam was vital for vessels navigating the largest river in Ukraine, the Dnipro. The explosion at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant is not only an environmental but also an economic disaster.

The destruction of an area similar to the size of London inspired Ukrainians to try to investigate – and hopefully one day prosecute – a novel crime: ecocide. 

In 2021, a group of international lawyers working under the Stop Ecocide International initiative proposed a definition of ecocide: "wrongful or deliberate actions taken with the knowledge that they are likely to result in serious and widespread or prolonged ecological damage." Since Ukraine cooperates with the lawyers from organization, a country could propose a similar definition as a party of Rome Statute — one of the key agreements that make up international law.