By Dan Gearino for Inside Climate News.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Duke Energy is proposing a three-year extension for the Gibson power plant in southwest Indiana, the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the country.
Gibson, originally scheduled to close in 2035, would remain open until 2038 and would get a retrofit to be able to run on natural gas or coal, according to a plan the utility released this week.
Duke said the proposal, if adopted by state regulators, will give it the resources and flexibility needed to handle a projected increase in electricity demand. At the same time, environmental advocates said the plan reflects an overreliance on fossil fuels and is a retreat from what they already saw as a weak approach to reducing emissions.
The dynamics in Indiana are similar to other states as the growth of data centers and regulatory backlogs in building renewable energy are making utilities more cautious about closing fossil fuel power plants.
But Indiana is a special case for a few reasons, including its history of coal mining and its heavy use of coal for producing electricity. The state ranks fourth in the country in electricity generation from coal, behind Texas, West Virginia and Kentucky, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Just a few years ago, Indiana was notable for taking steps away from coal. One of its utilities, NIPSCO, got national attention for its plan to close all its coal plants by 2028. Three years ago, the utility AEP said it would close the Rockport coal plant, the second-largest in Indiana and among the 10 largest in the country, by 2028.
The new Duke plan, which covers its Indiana power plants through 2044, is likely to add to concerns that Indiana utilities are backsliding on the progress they seemed to be making.
“These utility commitments are not really commitments,” said Ben Inskeep, program director for Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer and environmental advocacy group based in Indianapolis. “When the utility says they’re doing X by Y year, you know, if there’s no law forcing them to do so, they can change those plans on a dime.”
Indiana law requires electricity utilities to issue long-term plans for power plants every three years. Regulators will review the filing, take testimony from interested parties and then issue comments.
Nathan Gagnon, Duke’s managing director for Midwest resource planning, explained the proposal during an hours-long video meeting with interested parties. He spoke about a summary of the plan, with a more detailed filing to come in November.
“Coal drops off pretty steeply,” he said about the later years under the proposal. “There’s not much coal in the mix after ‘31 when you get down to it.”
He fielded questions from viewers, including members of the public, who had concerns about climate change and also wanted the company to explore developing new nuclear plants.
His answers highlighted that it takes years to implement big changes to electricity resources and that the company is looking for scenarios that have low costs while still meeting customers’ needs and following federal emissions rules.
Duke, based in North Carolina, is one of the country’s largest utilities, with customers in the Carolinas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.
It is proposing various changes to the five generating units at Gibson, which together have a summer generating capacity of 3,132 megawatts. Southern Co.’s Plant Bowen in Georgia, with capacity of 3,200 megawatts, is the only coal-fired plant that’s larger.
Under Duke’s preferred planning scenario, Gibson units 1 and 2 would be retrofitted by 2030 to be able to burn both coal and natural gas. Units 3 and 4 would be replaced by natural gas generating units by that same year and have no timetable for closing. Unit 5 would close by 2030.
Duke also is proposing to convert the Cayuga and Edwardsport coal plants to run on natural gas. (Edwardsport is unlike the other coal plants in that it uses a “coal gasification” technology that Duke once promoted as highly efficient, and now would be replaced by a less expensive process.)
Duke’s plan includes several gigawatts of new wind and solar, but most of this is in the last few years of the timeline.
The slow rollout of renewables is a detail that jumped out to Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling for the think tank Energy Innovation. He said Duke’s modeling of future costs of renewables look high to him, and creates a distorted picture.
“That’s a clear place where they have put their thumb on the scales,” he said.
He said Duke’s lack of near-term progress on renewables detracts from the company’s credibility when it talks about reducing emissions.
Duke issued this statement along with the plan:
“Duke Energy’s carbon emissions reduction goals remain unchanged, but our progress will not be linear as we retire coal and bring new generation resources online. Over time our diverse energy mix will enable us to reach our 2050 net-zero carbon emission ambitions.”
Dan Gearino wrote this article for Inside Climate News.
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By Seth Millstein for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for Connecticut News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
We talk a lot about carbon emissions in the context of climate change, but some of the most dangerous emissions aren't carbon at all. They're methane - a colorless, odorless glass that's primarily produced biologically and warms the planet much faster than carbon dioxide. The Biden administration took some good first steps to reduce America's methane emissions - but will President-elect Donald Trump build upon these steps when he assumes office, or claw back the progress that's been made?
Understanding Methane Emissions
Methane is one of the three main greenhouse gasses, along with carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. The Earth and its various ecosystems produce methane naturally; freshwater lakes, wetlands and permafrost are the primary natural sources of methane. It's also the main component of natural gas.
However, a 2021 United Nations report found that currently, roughly 60 percent of methane emissions are anthropogenic, or the result of human activity. Agriculture produces more methane than any other sector around the world, and around 90 percent of anthropogenic methane emissions come from one of three sources: agriculture, fossil fuels and waste.
The line between anthropogenic and naturogenic (naturally-occurring) methane emissions can be blurry. For instance, a major source of methane is cow burps (and, to a lesser extent, farts). While cows are obviously "naturally-occurring," animal agriculture is not, and neither is the amount of cows we've brought into existence. The sheer amount of methane produced by cows is the result of our domestication of them, not any sort of natural process.
Similarly, methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, and natural gas existed long before humans came around. But it's the extraction of natural gas that actually causes this methane to enter the atmosphere, and natural gas extraction is a human activity.
Semantics aside, one thing is certain: There's a lot more methane in the atmosphere than there would have been had humans never existed. And that's not good.
Why Is Methane a Problem?
Like other greenhouse gasses, methane contributes to climate change by warming the atmosphere and the planet. But it works a bit differently than carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.
Carbon dioxide makes up almost 80 percent of all greenhouse emissions, whereas methane constitutes just over 11 percent. In addition, methane dissipates rather quickly; it only sticks around in the atmosphere for around a decade, whereas carbon dioxide can linger for up to 1,000 years.
This might have you thinking that methane isn't that big of a deal, at least insofar as greenhouse gasses go. The problem is that methane traps much, much more heat than carbon dioxide - so much so that, over a 100 year period, methane has 27-30 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Over the course of 20 years, it has 80 times the warming potential.
In addition to warming the environment, methane also makes the air dangerous to breathe, because when sunlight interacts with methane, it forms a pollutant called tropospheric ozone. Although tropospheric ozone only stays in the air for a few weeks at most, it can be fatal; it's estimated that up to a million people die every year from respiratory diseases caused by ozone pollution, and methane is a major contributor to this.
How Do Farms Contribute to Methane Emissions?
Around one-third of all anthropogenic methane emissions come from livestock. There are two main reasons for this.
First, there are the burps. A number of animals produce methane as a natural byproduct of their digestive systems; these animals are known as ruminants, and they include not only cows but also sheep, goats, yaks and more. When ruminants burp, they release methane into the air. These are called enteric methane emissions.
The other main source of livestock-related methane emissions is the animals' manure - or, to be more precise, the manner in which farmers store the animals' manure.
Manure management is a significant component of livestock farming. One of the more common ways of storing manure is to put it in large lagoons or pits; this prevents it from leaking into nearby soil and waterways, and also allows farms to more accurately monitor and track their farms' manure output.
Over time, however, the top layer of manure in the lagoon hardens, which prevents oxygen from reaching the manure below. And this is a problem, because when manure is placed in an oxygen-free environment, the microorganisms that produce methane thrive and proliferate, thus increasing its methane emissions. That's exactly what happens in manure pits.
These two factors - enteric emissions and manure (mis)management - account for 80 percent of agriculture-related methane emissions. The other 20 percent comes from rice farming. Rice is a semi-aquatic plant that requires a layer of standing water to grow; this water prevents oxygen from reaching the microbes in the soil, allowing them to reproduce and create methane in a manner similar to manure in a lagoon.
The problem of livestock-related methane emissions is exacerbated by the fact that global meat production has been on the rise for the last 60 years, on both an absolute and per-capita level. This makes reducing these missions all the more important - but how?
How Can Farmers Reduce Their Methane Emissions?
A number of solutions have been proposed, and in some cases implemented, for reducing methane emissions.
Many of these involve new or emerging technologies. There are feed additives that reduce the amount of enteric methane production in ruminants' stomachs, for instance, and manure aeration systems that allow oxygen to flow into stored manure on farms. One company is even developing a methane-trapping mask for cattle to wear while grazing.
Other methane reduction strategies are decidedly more low-tech, such as selectively breeding animals to produce less methane. Simply making livestock farms more efficient on the whole can also have an impact, as this results in increased output with no corresponding increase in methane emissions.
All of these solutions, however, face obstacles. Fernanda Ferreira, Director for Agriculture Methane at Clean Air Task Force, tells Sentient that one of the biggest challenges in methane mitigation is the simple fact that production facilities and logistical operations vary wildly from farm to farm.
"Let's look at the U.S.," Ferreira says. "When you think about goats, sheep, beef and dairy farmers, you have a little over a million farmers. So we're talking about one million different ways of managing these animals. Even if you zoom in into one specific region - let's say the West, or a state like California - there will be variation."
This variation, Ferreira says, complicates efforts to implement methane mitigation technologies on a wide scale, because every farm is a unique operation with slightly different needs, capabilities and restrictions.
"When you zoom in, you have a lot of variation of how farmers handle these animals," Ferreira says. "And this is directly linked to the challenge of adopting [methane reduction] technologies."
Another major challenge is cost. Many of these solutions are expensive, and the cost of implementing them falls on the farmers themselves. But while methane reduction benefits all of humanity in the long run, it doesn't offer farmers any benefit in the short run. As such, farmers largely aren't incentivized to adopt these technologies.
Lastly, there's the simple fact that a lot of this technology is still in the research and development phase. As of this writing, only one synthetic methane-reducing feed additive has been approved by the FDA, and that approval only came six months ago. Other proposed additives are prohibitively expensive, not very effective or come with other drawbacks. The methane-trapping cow mask also has several logistical issues, and has been criticized as a potential form of greenwashing.
What Has President Biden Done About Methane?
In 2021, the Biden administration unveiled the U.S. Methane Emissions Action Plan, a 20-page document with various initiatives and proposals for reducing U.S. methane emissions. They include incentives for farmers to reduce their methane emissions, new regulations aimed at doing the same, and the formation of an interagency task force to collect methane and use it for "on-farm renewable activities."
"The U.S. Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan provides the framework for the work on agriculture methane emissions," Ferreira says. "The most important outcome that it supports is the deployment of climate smart-initiatives, such as the use of methane-reducing feed additives and the implementation, more broadly, of manure management practices."
In 2023, the Biden administration announced The National Strategy to Advance an Integrated U.S. Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, and Information System (yes, that's the official name). This set of policies is geared at improving the tracking, monitoring and reporting of greenhouse emissions, both inside and outside of the government.
These two action plans, Ferreira says, are important first steps in tackling the methane problem-head on. In addition to all of this, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, contained funding for a selection of "climate-smart" agricultural practices, including some aimed at reducing methane emissions from farms.
The Inflation Reduction Act also expanded the EPA's authority to regulate methane emissions, and created the Methane Emissions Reduction Program for the purpose of doing so. The Biden administration allocated $1 billion to this program in 2023, and in December, introduced new limits on methane emissions via the EPA.
However, these initiatives only apply to the oil and gas industries, so they won't have any effect on agricultural methane emissions.
What Will Trump Do About Methane?
Methane emissions weren't a central focus of the 2024 campaign, or even a tertiary one, and President-elect Trump made no policy pledges regarding methane. However, actions that he took as president during his first term strongly suggest that he'll seek to undo the Biden administration's progress on methane reduction.
During his time in office, Trump withdrew or weakened a number of federal regulations aimed at tracking and reducing methane emissions, including Obama-era rules that required oil and gas companies to monitor and fix methane leaks at their facilities and take steps to reduce methane emissions on public and tribal lands.
After Trump's 2024 victory, the Biden administration finalized a rule that fines oil and gas companies for their methane emissions, and there's been widespread speculation that Trump will scrap this rule once he assumes office.
Trump, who once said that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China to make U.S. manufacturing less competitive, withdrew or weakened over 100 environmental regulations during his first term. Nothing he's said or done indicates that he's changed his tune on climate matters since then, so it seems likely that he'll continue rolling back environmental protections, including those aimed at reducing methane emissions.
While this would be unfortunate, Trump is just one person, and America is just one country. There are plenty of other leaders around the world, both in the private and public sectors, making efforts to curb methane emissions.
Canada, Mexico, Japan and several other countries have made significant investments in methane reduction as part of the Global Methane Pledge, for instance. In addition, almost 100 mayors around the world have pledged to reduce their cities' emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement, which Trump withdrew the U.S. from. Meanwhile, Bill Gates has invested millions in a feed additive company aimed at reducing enteric methane production in livestock.
There are, in other words, plenty of opportunities for global action on methane that don't involve the U.S. president.
The Bottom Line
Reducing methane emissions is no easy task; there are technological, financial, logistical and even dietary hurdles. But given methane's rapid-fire warming potential, overcoming these obstacles isn't optional, but necessary.
Our planet won't remain liveable for future generations without a sharp reduction in methane emission. The Biden administration took some good first steps in bringing about such a reduction, and hopefully, more steps from other world leaders will follow, even if the Trump administration rolls back progress on the issue.
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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Connecticut is the subject of an offshore wind study which aims to identify supply chain opportunities for the state and the Northeast region.
Connecticut is committed to creating 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2040. So far, it has procurements for 1.5 gigawatts of offshore wind. The state's first offshore wind farm will be operational next year.
Kristin Urbach, executive director of the Connecticut Wind Collaborative, said the study can explore many offshore wind priorities.
"To pinpoint areas where supply chains currently fall short to propose actionable items to strengthen it," Urbach explained. "Also to boost our local economic growth with the support of local manufacturers for its infrastructure development while promoting job creation and sustainable growth in Connecticut."
Urbach pointed out the state can fill supply chain gaps by utilizing the 12,000-person shipbuilding and repair industry. Some experts believe tapping into this workforce can build up offshore wind development.
Connecticut's offshore wind future is strained. Gov. Ned Lamont paused a multistate deal, delaying Connecticut's ability to reach its 2030 goals. The study's findings will be released next spring.
Similar studies are underway in Louisiana, Maine, and South Carolina. Like them, Connecticut can generate sizable amounts of offshore wind power.
Courtney Durham Shane, senior climate mitigation officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, said offshore wind has quickly become a lucrative business nationwide.
"The United States has already seen $25 billion in offshore wind supply chain investment to date," Durham Shane noted. "Projections are showing that there could be upwards of $100 billion in private investment and nearly 50,000 jobs that are up for grabs domestically."
The New London State Pier terminal became the first East Coast offshore wind marshaling terminal with unobstructed ocean access. It can speed along the staging and assembly of several states' offshore wind projects. New York State's first offshore wind farm created 75 jobs at the facility, a number which is slated to double.
Disclosure: The Pew Charitable Trusts Environmental Group contributes to our fund for reporting on Endangered Species & Wildlife, Environment, and Public Lands/Wilderness. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
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