Auxin solar case, Utah climate senate race, and more

CHAPTERS

00:00.00 – Introduction: Climate Now host James Lawler welcomes our co-hosts, Darren Hau, Dina Cappiello, and Julio Friedmann, our listeners, and guest Eric Wesoff to the latest installment of Climate News Weekly.

00:19.77 – The solar panel market with Eric Wesoff: James, Julio, and Eric dive into the history of trade conflict relating to the solar photovoltaic (PV) cell market and the latest consequences of China’s tariff circumvention.

05:23.11 – Early 2023 US emissions numbers: James, Julio, Dina, and Darren go over the results of the Rhodium Group’s report on 2023 greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., covering high points, low points, and takeaways from their findings.

08:51.78 – India to double coal power generation: James, Julio, and Eric discuss what India’s intention to double coal power generation means- and more importantly what it doesn’t- for the country’s climate goals as well as the political realities behind this decision.

10:47.26 – Vehicle-to-grid technology: Darren tells James the basics of how electric vehicles could help preserve an overextended grid, China’s most recent demonstrations of the technology, and what it would take to make it happen at scale.  

14:55.91 – Climate on the ballot with Nathaniel Stinnett: The Environmental Voter Project’s Nathaniel Stinnett tells James about the significance of climate change in Mitt Romney’s open Senate seat and in the race to the White House in 2024. 

20:27.55 – Conclusion: James concludes this episode of Climate News Weekly by thanking our guests, co-hosts, and our partners at the Livermore Lab Foundation.

TRANSCRIPT

James Lawler: [00:00:00] Welcome to Climate News Weekly. Today, I’m very fortunate to be joined by our three co-hosts, Darren Hau, Dina Cappiello, and Julio Friedmann, as well as a new voice that we’ve not yet heard on Climate Now, but is, as he will self-describe, an institution: Eric Wesoff from Canary Media.

 Eric, would you mind just giving us a quick intro about you and your background, and then we can dive into a story that you’ve written?

Eric Wesoff: Hello. Thanks for having me. Uh, my name is Eric Wesoff. I’m the editorial director at Canary Media, a renewable energy outfit and an independent affiliate of Rocky Mountain Institute, RMI, and thanks for having me. 

James Lawler: Eric, so you’ve been tracking the solar PV market for a number of years. You wrote an article in 2012 that sort of marked the first salvo in trade wars around solar PV panel production, and you’ve just written an update in Canary Media on the Auxin lawsuit. For listeners who have not too- who are not [00:01:00] aware or not fully plugged into what the controversy is on these tariffs, can you quickly summarize them and then give us a sense of where the story is today? Like, why did you see the need for an update on the Auxin tariff story? 

Eric Wesoff: So to answer your question, no, I cannot quickly summarize this, but in 2012, the Obama administration instituted anti-dumping tariffs against China, claiming that China was selling solar modules and other solar equipment below their cost. There was also something called countervailing duty, CVD. We’ll get into that a little bit later. Obama’s motivation was probably to look strong with an anti-China stance.

These tariffs stayed in place and were expanded by Donald Trump in something called section 301 tariffs. And the, these tariffs were kept in place by the Biden administration, who is actually considering raising tariffs against China for [00:02:00] EVs, critical materials, and possibly solar modules. So 12 years, the story continues to go on.

Biden is also the president who’s instituted the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is actually making a difference, which is actually catalyzing gigawatts of solar manufacturing across the United States. And it’s only been a year and a half since the IRA was signed. And it’s, it’s resulting in gigawatt-scale capacity across the United States.

So what we’re seeing is does the stick of a tariff help a market or does the carrot of a manufacturing incentive, like in the IRA, really create results? And so I think we’re seeing this- the tariff stick does not work. 

James Lawler: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And now there’s been a new lawsuit, right? From Auxin Solar. And what is this about?

Eric Wesoff: Auxin, a very small, let’s call them an artisanal, boutique solar manufacturer in San Jose with a mere 150 [00:03:00] megawatts of capacity, which is inconsequential, filed a tariff complaint two years ago saying that China was circumventing, that’s the word, they were dodging, they were getting around the tariffs by exporting much of the raw materials to any of four Asian countries who were doing the final assembly and then shipping it to the United States. Auxin was claiming that China was creating a new supply chain simply to dodge the tariffs. 

And just the threat of the circumvention tariffs- the additional tariffs that would have been instituted if Auxin got its way- was enough to shut down the sol-, the utility-scale solar industry. And the solar industry has a habit of growing every quarter or at least every year. And the year that those tariffs were threatened was one of the few weak years that solar has had in the last 20 years. Two years ago, with the threat of the solar industry, industry being cratered, Biden [00:04:00] put a pause on those circumventing tariffs, much to the relief of the solar industry.

But that pause, it was a two-year pause through June, 2024. He, he did alleviate the immediate pain, but he essentially just kicked the can down the road. And the same existential threat suffered by the- that’s, that was suffered by the utility-scale solar industry two years ago is coming back in repeats in June of 2024.

So that was the pause and that’s the schedule for the tariffs coming back. Auxin was claiming that the pause caused damage to domestic companies. That’s what their current lawsuit is. Regardless of Auxin’s contortions and this current lawsuit, the fact of the matter is we are now reminded that these tariffs are coming back full force in five months.

And the solar industry, which is one of the, one of the success stories in renewable energy in terms of the amounts [00:05:00] of gigawatts that they- that has been installed both in the United States and across the globe above all expectations, above all forecasts and one of the few renewable sources that’s on target for its decarbonization goals will have the, the, the, the legs pulled out from under it if these, in the U.S. at least, if these tariffs are instituted again. 

Julio Friedmann: The politics around this are tricky. It is unclear whether or not there will be sufficient saber-rattling on the right to merit taking more decisive action or the opposite.

And we are starting to see pushback politically against green policies, not just in the U.S., but everywhere around the world. These suits are part and parcel to such things. I should add, by the way, that nothing about the energy transition is inevitable or easy. These tariffs just remind us of that in a very pointed kind of way.

James Lawler: So we want to move to another one this week. So the Rhodium Group has [00:06:00] issued a report on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions for 2023, an initial view as to what those were, and we’d like to report on that story. Julio, can you take the lead here? Tell us about that. 

Julio Friedmann: This is an annual event. The Rhodium Group every year does an estimate, uh, of the annual greenhouse gas emissions.

The EPA comes out with these more than a year later, and so it’s very helpful input. Their good news was that emissions dropped this year, and it has been growing since COVID started. This is the substantial drop compared to 1991 emissions, which was the original sort of Kyoto measure. So that’s all good.

It’s a good news, bad news story as well. All of the abatement basically happened in power, a little bit in buildings, but industrial and transportation emissions grew. It is also the case that most of the emissions reduction happened from switching off coal, but we added a lot of natural gas. 

Dina Cappiello: And Julio, when you say [00:07:00] abatement, can you just define that term?

Julio Friedmann: Yeah, thank you. In this case, we’re talking about emissions reduction that comes from a change of power source. So in this case, we have shut down coal plants. A lot of those were scheduled over the past years, but they landed this year. And a lot of that was associated with a switch to natural gas as well as a switch to renewables.

Okay. So we did have more renewables, but we actually had five times more gas than we got more renewables. 

Dina Cappiello: So the silver lining is the renewables to me, but I think it’s also worth pointing out and that GDP also went up as emissions went down. And I remember when I was a reporter, that seemed to be like, have your cake and eat it too.

Like, are you kidding me? Right? And, and the environmentalists would always say, “yeah, you can have robust economic growth and emissions can come down”. And as a reporter being trained to be skeptical, I’d say, “yeah, yeah, give me a break”. Right? But in this case, GDP did go up and emissions went slightly down, not [00:08:00] by a lot, I don’t think, by a little.

Darren Hau: Yeah, I ate more cake and my weight went down. 

Dina Cappiello: I love diets like that, Darren. 

James Lawler: Now, is this a first? Have we done this before? 

Julio Friedmann: Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s the first, no. We’ve had instances of that before, but this is a profound demonstration of it. And it’s been happening in other countries for many years. We’ve seen, for example, in Europe, that there has been strong economic growth with reduced emissions.

Again, a lot of that is done the same way. In most of those cases, in most of those countries, they’ve done it by decommissioning coal plants and then adding a mixture of renewables and natural gas. Um, and getting the associated economic growth from all that activity as well as others. 

James Lawler: And so just to, just to recap, this report says that we’re now 17.2 percent below 2005 levels in terms of our emissions.

Julio Friedmann: Yeah, which means we hit our Kyoto targets, but we’re going to miss our Paris targets, more work to do for everybody. 

James Lawler: So let’s move on to maybe the, the sort of an opposite story in, so India is poised to double coal power, [00:09:00] adding about 88 gigawatts of additional coal fired power generation, starkly ignoring the climate issue, it would seem, at least on the surface. 

But is there more color context that anyone can share on on that decision? 

Julio Friedmann: So let me start briefly. Uh, to be clear, India is also adding huge amounts of solar. They’re adding hydro. They’re adding nuclear. It’s not like they are being idle.

They have also asked for many years for what they call carbon headroom. They say, “Hey, uh, it basically stopping us from deploying any energy we want is a form of colonialism. And we know a lot about that. We’re going to do what we’re going to do”. 

Out of all the major economies, their zero target is the farthest out. It’s 2070 and they’ve argued for a long time that their emissions are going to rise. To be clear, this 88 gigawatts of thermal is a lot. Most of that is coal. To remind people, number one employer in India is the railroads. Number two employer is coal mines. And the number one thing they move is coal. So, this is- there’s an [00:10:00] election coming up.

You know, it’s not clear all of these coal plants will be built. But it’s also, as we said earlier in the program, cost of solar has been going up. Supply chains are challenged. So the, the rate of solar deployment in India has slowed and frankly, even if India tripled the rate of solar deployment, its emissions would just be flat because there’s that much growing electricity demand in India.

It’s one of these things you can have good news and bad news at the same time, two things can be true. India is a global leader in solar and their emissions are going up because they’re deploying coal. 

Eric Wesoff: They can electrify their transportation sector and still fuel it with coal-powered plants. 

Julio Friedmann: Well, and, and they are in fact a world beater on two-wheel and three-wheel electric vehicles.

Like, they’re really good at that. And emissions are going up. 

James Lawler: Another story from, from our friends at Bloomberg News, the idea here is to set up demonstrations of vehicle-to-grid technology. And we’ve covered this concept several times on the show, but the idea that our massive [00:11:00] numbers of EVs that are coming online uh, in particular, you know, I mean, in China, you know, is, is the leader here, can be potentially a really effective source of power for intermittent, you know, generation resources when wind isn’t blowing, sun isn’t shining, et cetera. 

So Darren, can you tell us what, what, what is the story about? What are these plans? 

Darren Hau: Yeah, essentially, you know, China has some pretty ambitious plans with regards to utilizing its large fleet of EVs. You know, they are the largest market for EVs today already.

They have an economic planning agency called the National Development and Reform Commission or NDRC. And they have basically set up a plan to set up 50 projects that will do V2G in some of the major cities in the country, vehicle-to-grid. 

James Lawler: Yeah. 

Darren Hau: And one of the first projects basically took 50 EVs and combined them together to deliver 2 megawatts of electricity back into the grid.

To give people a sense of how much that is, you know, 2 megawatts is 2000 kilowatts. And a typical house might consume, I don’t know, between five to [00:12:00] 10 kilowatts, sometimes at its peak. So you’re talking about several hundred homes worth of electricity being sent back into the grid. BloombergNEF is, you know, looking at the total impact that this could have, and they estimate that by 2040, all the EVs in China could have enough capacity to supply peak demand needs in the country.

James Lawler: That’s crazy. 

Darren Hau: Two caveats. Yeah, that’s pretty crazy . But two caveats to that: number one, BloombergNEF did mention that that’s if they are V2G capable, which not every car is. 

James Lawler: All right. What is the battery type that is most conducive to V2G applications? Because, you know, there’s a- the main concern with, with most of the lithium ion batteries that are, that are currently used in EVs is that they’re not, you don’t want to charge them and discharge them tons and tons of times.

But-

Darren Hau: -or haphazardly 

James Lawler: -or haphazardly or partially right? In the way that you’d ideally want to to provide valuable grid services such as, you know, discharge. 

Darren Hau: Yeah, as is the case with most of these questions, the issues become very nuanced, the deeper you dig, but I’ll try to [00:13:00] give a concise answer. Generally speaking, you know, people have been worried about the reliability and lifetime of their batteries.

If they’re doing like an additional cycle during the day, that is a concern to take seriously. That being said, I think a lot of people are finding that the batteries are actually a lot more reliable than we thought they would be. Some studies out of Recurrent have shown that even if you DC fast charge your Tesla- now that’s just where Tesla is, I don’t want to speak to the rest of the EVs. 

If you fast charge them regularly, it doesn’t really affect the reliability all that much. Now it does affect it, but it’s just maybe not as severe as people believed. That being said, you know, if you want to play it on the safe side, go for a chemistry that is known for longer cycle life, so that would be say lithium iron phosphate or LFP rather than a cobalt or nickel based chemistry. 

James Lawler: And how many vehicle manufacturers are contemplating LFP battery systems at scale? 

Darren Hau: Yeah, I think more and more vehicle manufacturers are moving to LFP simply because it is lower cost now. [00:14:00] 

James Lawler: Oh, it’s also lower cost. 

Darren Hau: Uh, the, the disadvantage is it’s not as energy-dense on the cell level, but I think we’ve mentioned this in past episodes.

You really need to think of total pack energy density, not cell level, because LSP is also more thermally stable at higher temps. You can afford to pass them more densely, maybe reduce some of the cooling requirements, which means that the difference in pack-level energy density might not be as big as again, most people assume. One more caveat to this whole V2G thing is again, this has been- Eric, this is sort of like nuclear.

I feel like everyone’s like, “Oh, V2G is right around the corner”. It’s always around the corner. The fact is that I, I think this definitely abide by the 80-20 rule or maybe the 90-10 rule. V2G is something that gives you maybe like 10 percent extra benefit, but it’s a lot of effort and engineering expense to enable it.

Whereas the easiest thing you can do is just manage charging. Basically, be smart about when you charge so you don’t overload the grid. 

James Lawler: Thanks, Darren. Our final guest on today’s Climate News Weekly episode is Nathaniel [00:15:00] Stinnett, who is the founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project.

Nathaniel has previously joined us, and we’re glad to have him back today to talk about climate on the ballot. So two candidates are running in a race for Mitt Romney’s open seat. And tell us about this race, Nathaniel, and what should we be watching out for on the climate front? 

Nathaniel Stinnett: Yeah, so for some background, back in September, Mitt Romney announced he wasn’t running for re-election.

And since then, almost a dozen Republicans have announced for the seat, and more recently a few Democrats. But what’s especially interesting here is that there are two serious, self-professed climate candidates running, one in the Democratic primary, but also one in the Republican primary. 

And in the Republican primary, Congressman John Curtis is stressing the importance of addressing the climate crisis. And although many activists push back that [00:16:00] he opposed the Inflation Reduction Act and overemphasizes the role of carbon capture, which is not something that all activists agree on having a place in the transition away from fossil fuels there’s no doubt that Curtis is branding himself in a greener way than Republicans normally do.

And then on the Democratic side, just a few days ago, world renowned ski mountaineer and environmental activist Caroline Gleich, announced her run for Senate. Now, Gleich has climbed Mount Everest. She won ski mountaining- mountaineering championships, but she also has testified in Washington, D. C. on how climate change is affecting snow sports.

She’s centered her campaign announcement around climate action and air quality. And she’s known around the country as being an environmental activist and volunteering for groups. Including, full disclosure, she once hosted a phone bank for the non-profit that I run. So, [00:17:00] James, Utah is becoming a state to watch for climate activists.

James Lawler: Yeah, very interesting. So, you have on both sides of the line, you know, folks who believe the climate is changing, obviously, and believe that it’s human caused and believe we need to do something about it. But on one side, you have kind of the technocratic angle, those that are more in favor of doing things that don’t necessarily require the immediate abandonment of fossil fuels.

They’ll lean into things like permitting reform, which is a pill that is swallowable by both sides because it allows more renewables onto the grid, but it also maybe eases the way for, you know, fossil fuel infrastructure for that contingent. Versus, on the other side you have more sort of conservation-oriented, more hard, more of a hard line against fossil fuels.

Nathaniel Stinnett: I think you’re right, James. And you’re right to struggle with it in a nuanced way. In part because we’re not used to- it’s been a long time- we’re not used to seeing a lot of [00:18:00] Republicans run as climate candidates. 

James Lawler: Right. 

Nathaniel Stinnett: But it is starting to happen. 

James Lawler: It’s like the Republicans need to figure out, it’s an issue, like people care about it, but how are we going to talk about it? And what is our position going to be? 

Nathaniel Stinnett: That’s exactly right. 

James Lawler: Yeah, very interesting. Second story, as we looked toward the 2024 presidential election, you know, there’s all kinds of punditry that we’re hearing and we’ll hear more of about, you know, who will claim different blocs of voters.

And so one very interesting question is whether climate voters will become the largest bloc of, uh, voters for Biden. So whether the climate will be maybe enough to kind of drive a majority towards, towards Biden. How do you think about that, that question, Nathaniel? 

Nathaniel Stinnett: Yeah, so it’s not only punditry season. It is also polling season again. And now that we’re in 2024, it seems like every day a new poll comes out, but the Economist YouGov weekly [00:19:00] tracking poll is one I pay close attention to because it regularly asks voters what their number one issue priority is. 

And this is important, James, because although some people aren’t single-issue voters, many Americans are, and forcing poll respondents to list just one top issue often helps us understand the very question you ask, which is, you know, how will single-issue voters feel and act in a big presidential election year? 

Additionally, this poll sorts people’s responses by whether they voted for Joe Biden or Donald Trump in 2020. And so here’s what we’re seeing when we look at those two groups. In 40 out of the 52 weekly tracking polls that came out last year-

James Lawler: 80 percent.

Nathaniel Stinnett: –more Biden voters now list climate change as their top issue than any other [00:20:00] issue. In other words, if Joe Biden wants to rebuild his winning coalition from 2020, it’s looking more and more like he can’t do it without overwhelming support and turnout from climate voters because they are now the single biggest issue constituency group in his coalition. 

James Lawler: Yeah, he needs to bring them back and get them excited to turn out. That’s really the point. 

Nathaniel Stinnett: Exactly. Exactly. 

James Lawler: Well, thank you all for joining us this week. We hope you all can join us next week.

Climate Now is made possible in part by our science partners like the Livermore Lab Foundation. The Livermore Lab Foundation supports climate research and carbon cleanup initiatives at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which is a Department of Energy applied science and research facility. More information on the Foundation’s climate work can be found at livermorelabfoundation.org.