Climate-change groups are calling attention to the environmental destruction linked to the wood pellet industry - even as California is considering a proposal to build two plants. The U.S. is the biggest wood pellet exporter in the world - mostly to Europe.

Laura Haight, U.S. policy director for the Partnership for Policy Integrity, wants the European Union and the U.K. to change their policies.

"In Europe, they treat burning wood as renewable energy and heavily subsidize it. And they're importing massive quantities of wood pellets to fuel their power plants," she said. "And a lot of that is coming from the United States. That's where a lot of our forest destruction is happening. "

More than 100 groups recently wrote
to European Union leaders asking them to prohibit subsidies for wood that comes from living trees. Wood pellet companies claim they only use waste wood from logging or dead wood in the forest that fuels wildfire. But investigations have produced proof that companies have clear-cut forests in the southeastern U.S.

Haight added that burning wood for energy is terrible for the climate.

"There's a large release of carbon dioxide emissions into the air when you burn it. And at the same time, you're removing the tree that is helping us lock in our carbon and so you're both increasing emissions and reducing our capacity to store carbon," she said.

Two wood pellet plants -- the first of their kind in California -- are proposed for Lassen and Tuolumne counties. The plants would be built by Golden State Natural Resources, a public benefit corporation whose board members are local county officials.

Elly Pepper, deputy director of international wildlife conservation for the Natural Resources Defense Council, opposes the projects.

"It would be bad for the air, bad for the wildlife and lands, bad for the communities. And it would be basically California assenting to bioenergy as a renewable energy source when it's most definitely not," Pepper said.

The company did not respond to a request for comment but says on its website that the plants would quote "procure and process sustainably sourced excess forest vegetation into a pelletized renewable fuel source to replace the use of coal."

The New York State Senate has passed the HEAT Act, which now goes to the Assembly.

The legislation aims to phase out gas-line extension allowances, which would reduce the use of natural gas in the state. It would also allow the Public Service Commission the authority to keep utility companies in line with the state's climate laws.

Robin Wilt, a town council member in Brighton, said the equity component in the bill is needed. It would protect low- to moderate-income customers from bearing energy burdens greater than a certain percentage of their income.

She thinks it would also help communities disproportionately affected by climate change.

"I think it's important, as we move forward, that we always keep that equity piece in mind, and that we're reparative," Wilt asserted. "Those communities that bear the brunt of our past climate policy should be the first beneficiaries of any future policy."

A 2021 state report noted there are barriers to helping certain disadvantaged communities, including places lacking access to "climate smart" programs, like distributed energy efficiency and low-emission transportation. The HEAT Act is under review by the Assembly's Corporations, Authorities and Commissions Committee.

The biggest challenge to passing this bill is time, since the New York Legislature adjourns at the end of the week.

John Polimeni, a city council member in Schenectady, predicts another challenge lies ahead to implement some of the provisions.

"I think there's a concern by some that the infrastructure's not there yet in New York State for a completely electric grid," Polimeni acknowledged. "I think there's some merit to that, but I think also that it's the old saying, 'If you don't just go in, it'll never happen.'"

He added opposition from fossil-fuel companies has also been a challenge.

Federal initiatives are already underway to reduce methane waste. A Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan aims to accelerate the process through solutions like plugging leaks from abandoned gas wells.

It is getting increasingly expensive to have a home on the edge of the woods in California, in terms of home value and insurance costs.

A new study from the nonprofit think tank Resources for the Future found home values in a fire hazard severity zone drop 4.3%, an average of $21,500, when sellers make the required disclosure.

Margaret Walls, director of the climate risks and resilience program for Resources for the Future and the report's co-author, said the market is driving the price drop.

"We want to know that people understand the risks when they choose where to buy a house," Walls explained. "And if they do know the risks, we would expect them to be reflected in the prices."

Walls pointed out that to mitigate the risk of a destructive wildfire, local governments can limit building in the urban/wildland interface. The state and federal governments can reduce the fuel load on public lands. Homeowners can remove brush and other flammable materials, make sure building materials are fire-resistant, and build in defensible space.

Two large insurance companies, State Farm and Allstate, just announced they are no longer writing new homeowner's policies in California, in large part due to the risk of wildfire. Walls noted the effects of climate change are taking a financial toll.

"If you're in a high-fire-risk area, it's already hard to get insurance," Walls stressed. "So now, two more companies are unavailable to you. So, you'll probably end up going to the FAIR plan, considered the insurance of last resort."

The FAIR plan is a state-run risk pool offering fire insurance in high-risk areas not served by traditional insurers.

By Whitney Bauck for Reasons to be Cheerful.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When Trondheim-based Magnus Korpås bought his first electric car in 2019, he settled on a Tesla—the model of car that offered the most charging stations available to him at the time. However, in just a few years, Norway built out its charging infrastructure so quickly that no matter what type of electric vehicle (EV) you choose, there’s virtually always a charging point nearby.

“In Norway, we’re quite used to electric vehicles. This is the common car now,” says the professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “You diverge from the standard if you buy something else, really.”

For the past three decades, Norway has doggedly endeavored to electrify its vehicle fleet, using a mix of infrastructure investments, subsidies and regulations to nudge people into electric cars. The results have been remarkable: 20% of cars on the road are EVs, and Norway was the first country in the world to see EV car sales begin to outpace fossil fuel car sales. Today, 80% of new cars sold in Norway are electric. 

By comparison, the U.S. is woefully lagging. It is estimated that less than 1% of cars on U.S. roads are electric, and while EV sales are rapidly growing stateside, they still account for just under 5% of new cars sold in the country. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is meant to help speed the transition from fossil fuel cars to EVs as part of a bid to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, about 27% of which are attributable to transportation. 

While the IRA is designed to promote EV uptake through purchase subsidies, it simultaneously aims to vastly expand the U.S.’s EV charging network. Range anxiety, concern that a car will run out of charge while out on the road, is a significant factor keeping Americans from buying EVs. While many climate advocates argue that reducing transportation emissions requires strengthening public transit options and making cities more bikeable and walkable, promoting EV adoption is the fix most prominent in the IRA.

“There’s strong consensus that vehicle electrification is a big part of the [climate] solution. But you can’t do that without having the charging infrastructure,” says Ben Shapiro, the manager of the Carbon-Free Transportation team at the clean energy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute. “From a climate perspective, it’s imperative.” 

According to Shapiro, the U.S. needs “orders of magnitude more charging infrastructure than we have today” to reach its goal of making half of all vehicle sales zero-emissions by 2030. Norway—which has more EVs per capita, and more chargers per EV, than any other place in the world—offers a roadmap for how to get there.

The great buildout

Up to this point, EV charging infrastructure in the U.S. has been driven largely by private investment. Tesla has installed more than 163,000 chargers across the country, but its chargers only work on Teslas for now (though that’s scheduled to change soon). In January, Mercedes-Benz announced that it would install 2,500 high-powered chargers that will work with any car by 2027, following Volkswagen’s 2021 announcement that it planned to have 10,000 fast chargers in North America by 2025.

In Norway, too, Tesla was the first major commercial player to begin building out public charging stations in an effort to make its product more appealing. As EV adoption continued to increase in the 2000s and 2010s, the Norwegian government stepped in to ensure charging points were easy to use and equitably distributed. It invested 7 million euros to create 1,900 charging points by 2011. 

Parallel measures to increase charging accessibility started to ramp up in the U.S. with the passage of recent policy like the IRA and Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIL). The latter invests $7.5 billion in EV charging with the goal of building out a network of 500,000 chargers across the nation by 2030, while the former restores expired tax credits for installing EV chargers in low-income communities and rural areas. The Biden administration finalized new standards that will make U.S. charging infrastructure available to everyone, regardless of what brand of car they drive. (Tesla’s formerly exclusive Supercharger network will soon be open to all brands of EVs).

Norway offers additional lessons for prioritizing equity. Since more than 82% of EV users in Norway charge their vehicles at home, housing associations can apply for grants that subsidize up to 50 percent of the cost of buying and installing communal chargers. The Norwegian government also created “a law that parking garages have to establish the basic infrastructure, like having the electricity available,” says assistant general secretary of the Norwegian EV Association Petter Haugneland. 

Improving grid capacity

Analysis from S&P Global estimates that the U.S. needs to quadruple the number of EV chargers between 2022 and 2025 to keep pace with the EVs that will be on the road. If Norway’s experience is any indicator, encouraging EV adoption itself might be the best tool the U.S. has to increase charger proliferation. 

According to Korpås, Norway’s path to charging point saturation started by stimulating more demand for EVs–just as the U.S. has done with EV purchase tax credits embedded in the IRA. But while the U.S. only incentivizes EV purchases, Norway also disincentivizes purchases of non-electric cars. Its “polluter pays” principle means that fossil fuel cars are taxed higher than EVs. The purchase tax on fossil fuel-burning cars is calculated by a combination of weight and emissions, which means bigger, more polluting cars are more expensive.

Because Norway is a cold country that had already built out extensive grid capacity to handle the population’s heating needs—most of which are met with electricity—the Norwegian grid was decently equipped to handle the energy demand from EVs, Korpås says. In other words, the grid infrastructure was already in place even if public chargers were not. 

Much like Norway, about 80% of EV charging in the U.S. happens at home. But the U.S.’s grid doesn’t have as much relative capacity as Norway’s, in part because the U.S. tends to rely more on natural gas for heating. Expanding EV charging infrastructure in the U.S. will rely more on building out the electrical grid’s overall capacity than on building more public charging ports.

Another contributing factor to Norway’s success adopting EVs is its deep pockets — which is, in no small part, due to its status as a major oil exporter. The country of 5 million people collected almost $90 billion in tax revenue from the oil and gas industry last year, according to Norwegian officials, and its per capita gross domestic product is $20,000 more than the United States’, per World Bank data. And while the IRA has freed up funding for climate initiatives stateside, many decarbonization projects have and will continue to run into dead ends until the U.S. begins to more proactively plan its grid buildout.

“There’s a pretty significant investment that will need to take place to support all of this new electrical demand,” says RMI’s Shapiro. “That’s not only an electric utility issue, that’s also a regulatory issue. We have a lot of work to do from an electric sector public policy perspective to enable the utilities to move more quickly on this to get ahead of the growing demand for charging.” Part of what that means, he says, is streamlining the permitting process so utilities can quickly invest in infrastructure that can anticipate future electricity needs.

According to Haugneland, the Norwegian EV Association’s members use public fast chargers about twice a month, and a host of third-party charging companies are stepping in to take advantage of the growing market. Companies like Recharge and Eviny are establishing fast chargers, which can charge an EV battery to about 80% capacity in 30-45 minutes. These stations are everywhere from traditional gas stations to grocery stores to McDonalds’, with a growing number of chargers outside the major cities for when people take longer trips. 

‘You can’t copy everything’

These days, one of the biggest frustrations Norwegian EV drivers face, according to Haugneland and Korpås, is that there’s no easy, centralized way to find or pay for charging across all the different platforms. If the U.S. can get ahead of that problem by ensuring a more standardized approach to locating and paying for public charging, as the Biden administration has committed to, it will benefit drivers, Haugneland says. So will a streamlined permitting policy that allows electric utilities to build out grid infrastructure more quickly so they can meet increased electricity demand from EVs, Shapiro says.  

“The European and U.S. market may be five years behind, but hopefully you will catch up very soon,” says Haugneland. “Of course you can’t copy everything, but I think there’s a lot of learning to be done from the Norwegian market.”


Whitney Bauck wrote this article for Reasons to be Cheerful.


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