Atlantic Shores, one of two offshore wind developers chosen by the state last month to build wind farms off the Jersey coast, is looking to eventually build up to 3,000 megawatts of wind turbines in lease areas it has obtained.
The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities approved the 1,510-MW project in the southern portion of its lease area 10 to 20 miles off the coast between Atlantic City and Barnegat Light on June 30. The Atlantic Shores project is a joint venture of EDF Renewables and New Shell Energies LLC.
Atlantic Shores, however, has purchased leases for 183,000 acres — the largest yet obtained by an offshore wind developer — and hopes to develop the northern portion after obtaining approvals in future solicitations, company officials said during a virtual open house it sponsored Tuesday.
“We are doing everything we can to help New Jersey meet its clean-energy goals,’’ said Jessica Dealy of Atlantic Shores during one of the break-out sessions during the open house. New Jersey is hoping to build 7,500 MW of offshore wind capacity by 2035.
Supplying power, cleaning air, adding jobs
The initial project could supply power to up to 700,000 homes, avoid the equivalent of greenhouse-gas emissions from roughly one-third of all cars in New Jersey, and could create up to 22,290 jobs over its 30-year lifespan. The project is predicted to be operational by 2027, with 111 turbines, according to the company.
Analysts at Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Rider’s bond rating earlier this week and gave the private, New Jersey university a “negative” outlook. The rating agency cited Rider’s “very weak operating performance,” reliance on a line of credit to cover its expenses, and the financial effects of the pandemic at the 4,600-student school.
The Lawrenceville university’s rating was downgraded from Ba1, or “junk bond” status, to Ba2, an even lower version of junk bond status. “Junk” is a term used for below-investment-grade bonds, meaning Moody’s is telling investors Rider is a risky investment and has a chance of not being able to pay back the money it borrows.
“While the university has articulated strategies to improve operations, a turnaround, if achievable, will take multiple years,” said the Moody’s report issued Tuesday.
Rider is among many small- and mid-size private universities that were already struggling to stay out of the red before the pandemic wreaked further havoc on their finances. In New Jersey, Centenary University in Hackettstown and Drew University in Madison are among the private colleges that have publicly discussed their ongoing financial problems.
Many of the smaller private schools are having trouble attracting students when there are less costly public universities nearby with similar programs and amenities.
For Rider, the lower bond rating means it will be more expensive for the university to borrow money for construction or other projects. Ririder University reported approximately $89 million in outstanding debt in 2020, the analysts said. That debt rose to about $110 million with the issuance of new bonds in May.
A massive solar farm is coming to the small Maine community of Buxton.
Glenvale Solar, based out of Boston, is creating a 119-acre solar farm on a plot of land in the York County town.
The owners of the property and Glenvale have been working for the last two years on the idea.
Aidan Foley, the founder of Glenvale Solar, said the farm will sell energy to ratepayers at a low price and will connect to existing Central Maine Power transmission lines.
Glenvale Solar said the massive solar farm will be tucked away out of sight.
“I think most people in Buxton wouldn’t know this project was here if they didn’t read about it in the newspaper,” Foley said. “It’s on a private, secluded piece of land that you don’t see from any main roads.”
Glenvale plans to start work next year and said the project will generate about 100 construction jobs.
EPEditor’s note: Even if Buxton ends up hosting the only solar farm unknown to opponents, it won’t be the town’s only claim to fame. In the film, The Shawshank Redemption, based on a story by Maine native Stephen King, Buxton is the site of the oak tree and rock wall where ‘Red’ goes after being released from prison to retrieve a message from his friend Andy Dufresne, who escaped from prison earlier. We trust you’ve seen the film as it seems to appear on one cable station or another almost every month. Despite that, I still haven’t. What’s your recommendation? Watch or skip? –FB
Water levels at California’s Lake Shasta have dropped to 37 percent of capacity. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
By Diana Leonard, Laris Karklis, and Zach LevittWashington Post
Reservoir levels are dropping throughout the West, as the drought tightens its grip on the region and intense summer heat further stresses both water supply and the surrounding landscape. Many reservoirs are at or approaching historic low levels due to lackluster rainy seasons combined with increasing temperatures due to climate change.
The drought crisis is perhaps most apparent in the Colorado River basin, which saw one of its driest years on record, following two decades of less-than-adequate flows. The nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas, is at its lowest level since the lake was filled after the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s; it currently sits at 1,069 feet above sea level, or 35 percent of its total capacity. It supplies water to Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico.
Further upstream, Lake Powell, which feeds Lake Mead, is at only 34 percent of its total capacity. By next spring, Lake Powell is projected to hit its lowest level since it was filled in 1964, possibly jeopardizing its ability to generate power.
Amid a warm spring and early-season heat, mountain snowpack never made it into rivers and reservoirs — it simply seeped into bone-dry soils or sublimated directly into the atmosphere. This kind of reduced runoff “efficiency” is expected in a warming climate, and it contributed to the quickly intensifying drought this year in California and other states.
“The reservoir levels in the second year of this drought are what they were during the third or fourth year of the previous drought,” said Jay Lund, a professor and water resources expert at the University of California at Davis.
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One of those companies, 3M, says it acted ‘responsibly’ and will defend its environmental record
File photos: DuPont and 3M are among the companies being sued.
By Jon Hurdle, NJ Spotlight
Four New Jersey towns and an investor-owned water supplier are suing 3M, DuPont, and other makers of PFAS — so-called forever chemicals — saying the companies knew their products would contaminate drinking water but continued to sell them, and must now pay for their cleanup.
Camden and Point Pleasant are suing the companies in federal court in South Carolina — where some cases are consolidated — for the manufacture and sale of the chemicals used in firefighting foam. This product has contaminated groundwater in many places around the country, especially on and near military bases.
Meanwhile, Hopatcong, Pequannock, and the Middlesex Water Company are suing in federal court in New Jersey, seeking compensation for the costs of removing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from public water supplies to comply with health standards recently set by New Jersey.
“3M marketed and sold PFAS in New Jersey with the knowledge that PFAS would be released into the environment and without warning users or others of the risks of PFAS to the environment and to human health,” Middlesex said in an amended suit, filed in May.
Getting chemicals out of drinking water
The lawsuits are the latest in a series of legal, regulatory, and legislative efforts to reduce the chemicals in drinking water sources, where they are believed to threaten public health or to seek compensation from those held responsible for the contamination.
In 2019, Ridgewood Water, a publicly owned water utility in Bergen County, sued DuPont, saying the chemical giant was responsible for the PFAS in public wells that forced it to install filtration equipment to meet the new state standards. New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection last year sued Solvay, a South Jersey chemical manufacturer, accusing it of contaminating groundwater with perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), a type of PFAS.
And the DEP has in the last several years set some of the nation’s strictest health standards for the presence of three kinds of PFAS in drinking water, responding to gathering evidence that the chemicals are linked to some cancers, immune-system problems, high cholesterol, and other illnesses.
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The US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Monday said it is launching the environmental review process for the Vineyard Wind South offshore wind project with a capacity of about 2 GW-2.3 GW.
The plan submitted by Vineyard Wind LLC, a joint venture between the renewables unit of Avangrid Inc (NYSE:AGR) and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), calls for the installation of up to 130 wind turbines offshore Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The project is to be developed in phases, with phase one being the 804-MW Park City Wind project that has a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.
On June 30, BOEM will publish a notice of intent (NOI) to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the Vineyard Wind South project, which will initiate a 30-day public comment period. BOEM will then use the comments to prepare a scoping report identifying the issues that should be analysed in the Vineyard Wind South draft EIS.
The proposed project also includes two to five offshore substations, inter-array cables and up to five export cables that will link to the onshore grid in Barnstable County, Massachusetts at up to three onshore substations. Most of the project is located within Lease OCS-A 0534, with a small portion of the area within Lease OCS-A 0501 also identified for potential development, explains BOEM.
The Interior Department will suspend several oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Tuesday, according to three individuals briefed on the decision, overturning one of President Donald Trump’s most significant environmental acts during his last days in office.
The move, which could spark a major legal battle, aims to unwind nearly a dozen leases in the heart of a pristine expanse in Alaska that Republicans and Democrats have fought over for four decades. The Trump administration auctioned off the right to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain — home to hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears — just two weeks before President Biden was inaugurated.
Several individuals briefed on the Biden administration’s decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been formally announced yet, said Interior would halt the leases on the grounds that Trump officials rushed the Jan. 6 auction and did not follow proper procedures.
The step, coming just days after the Justice Department defended another drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, underscores the balancing act the new administration aims to strike as it slows fossil fuel development on public lands. While Biden has paused new federal oil and gas leasing and pledged to drastically cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, he has taken a much more cautious approach toward most oil and gas operations approved under his predecessor.
On Wednesday, Justice Department attorneys filed a brief defending ConocoPhillips’s Willow project, an oil reservoir on the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska that could hold up to 300 million barrels of oil. The administration also has defended the Trump administration’s decision to issue oil and gas leases in Wyoming and declined to press for the shutdown of the Dakota Access pipeline, a project Interior Secretary Deb Haaland protested while serving in Congress.
But Tuesday’s move signaled that the new administration was willing to take aggressive action in an area that has been a rallying cry for environmentalist for decades.
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Steve Adubato speaks with U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D) – NJ, 6th Congressional District, to discuss President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the role of the media in climate change, and the political divide across the nation. U.S. Rep Pallone also talks about the CLEAN Future Act and the importance of following safety protocols during the pandemic.
The CLEAN Future Act is the response to the climate action plan, explains Pallone. He suggests in order for people to understand climate change as more than just a myth, you have to bring it down to a level that they can understand. Pallone believes changes in weather patterns, temperatures rising, sea level rising, and greenhouse gases is impacting our health. For instance, greenhouse gases are linked to causing asthma and respiratory problems.
Pallone discusses the political divide and how this impacts individuals’ thoughts on climate change. He says both Republicans and Democrats are concerned about climate change, “I really don’t think, when it comes down to it, that we really don’t disagree…we’ve actually been doing things to address climate action on a bipartisan basis.” In addition, COVID-19 is another huge issue that has caused a political divide among Americans. Pallone says people’s ideologies are affecting their decision to get vaccinated and wear masks in public.
A fertilizer plant in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian
By Oliver Milman, The Guardian
Michael Regan, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has sought to revive the effort to confront environmental racism by ordering the agency to crack down on the pollution that disproportionately blights people of color.
On Wednesday, Regan issued a directive to EPA staff to “infuse equity and environmental justice principles and priorities into all EPA practices, policies, and programs”. The memo demands the agency use the “full array of policy and legal tools at our disposal” to ensure vulnerable communities are front of mind when issuing permits for polluting facilities or cleaning up following disasters.
The directive states there should be better consultation with affected communities and indicates the EPA will be tougher on companies that violate air and water pollution mandates. Regan’s memo calls for the EPA to “strengthen enforcement of violations of cornerstone environmental statutes and civil rights laws in communities overburdened by pollution”.
Enforcement of pollution violations dropped steeply under Donald Trump’s administration, with the EPA even suspending routine inspections of facilities while the Covid-19 pandemic raged in the US last year.
A lack of federal intervention further exacerbated a longstanding inequity where poorer people and communities of color in the US are far more likely to be exposed to dangerous pollutants. The pandemic has further worsened this situation, with research showing that people with chronic exposure to air pollutants have suffered worse outcomes from Covid.
Years of discriminatory decisions over the placement of highways and industrial facilities have led to Black people being exposed to 38% more polluted air than white people, with exposure to toxins from cars and trucks in parts of the US two-thirds higher than for white people. Black children are five times more likely to be hospitalized from asthma than white children.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan
“The EPA has focused on environmental justice for more than 30 years but while we have made progress there is so much more to do,” Regan told the Guardian. “We have not served communities to the level they should be served. We need to focus more on our efforts to uplift all communities, regardless of the money in their pockets, their race or zip codes.”Advertisement
The EPA administrator said that he will use the agency’s authority “to the fullest extent to protect public health, particularly vulnerable communities. Enforcement is a critical piece of this, I will be fair but tough in terms of what the agency must do.”
Joe Biden has directed all federal agencies to develop environmental justice policies and has vowed that 40% of climate and infrastructure spending be directed towards disadvantaged communities. Advocates have warned, however, that the administration has plenty of work to uproot a legacy of environmental racism that stretches back generations.
“Trump depleted the EPA but these problems didn’t just start with Trump,” said Peggy Shepard, executive director of We Act for Environmental Justice.
“Emissions from heavy-duty trucks is a priority, lead in water is a priority, lead still being in paint is a priority. There is a lot to do and we need to do more than just roll back the rollbacks. We need to really examine the whole regulatory system if we are actually committed to strong public health standards in this country.”
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