EnviroPolitics Blog

Nancy Pinkin, NJ Assembly environment committee chair, sworn as Middlesex clerk, creating Assembly vacancy

[Editor’s note: Pinkin had served for several years as chair of the Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee. Her replacement in that position has not yet been named.]

By Nikita Biryukov, NJ Globe

Assemblywoman Nancy Pinkin was sworn in as Middlesex County clerk Thursday, creating an Assembly vacancy Middlesex Democrats will have to fill in the next month.

Pinkin replaces outgoing Clerk Elain Flynn, the longest serving clerk in Middlesex County’s history, who chose to retire rather than seek re-election.

“I look forward to working with Middlesex County over the upcoming years, and I thank you for the privilege to serve as the Middlesex County Clerk,” Pinkin said.

Also sworn in were County Commissioners Leslie Koppel and Charles Tomaro, who served on the board as freeholders. All three were sworn in by County Commission clerk Amy Petrocelli.

Middlesex’s reorganization saw greetings from many of New Jersey’s highest-ranking Democrats: U.S. Sens. Cory Booker (D-Newark) and Bob Menendez (D-North Bergen), Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), Gov. Phil Murphy, Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford) and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Woodbridge).

“To my friend, Nancy Pinkin, congratulations to you as your service as Middlesex County Clerk. This is such an important role, responsibility,” Booker said. “In fact, it is a true honor, but you have proven yourself as such a great leader for our state and our community, and I am grateful you are serving in this important role.”

County Commissioner Ron Rios was again elected to head the board, and Commissioner Kenneth Armwood was elected deputy director.

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Police officer killed in mob attack on U.S. Capitol is from New Jersey

By Jeff Goldman | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

The police officer killed when a violent mob of pro-President Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday is a New Jersey native, according to reports.

Brian D. Sicknick, 42, is a 1997 graduate of Middlesex County Vocational Technical High School’s East Brunswick who grew up in neighboring South River, according to Heavy.com

Sicknick, who lived in Springfield, Virginia, served two tours with the National Guard in the Middle East before joining the U.S. Capitol police in 2008. He was assigned to the department’s First Responders Unit.

The U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement that Sicknick was injured “while physically engaging with protesters” during the Wednesday riot. Sicknick, who was pronounced dead at 9:30 p.m. Thursday, is the fifth person killed because of the melee. His death will be investigated as a homicide.

Sicknick was hit with a fire extinguisher while trying to protect the U.S. Capitol, NYTimes.com reported.

Sicknick’s brother told ABC News that his sibling died “a hero.”

One protester, a woman, was shot to death by Capitol Police, and there were dozens of arrests. Three other people died after “medical emergencies” related to the breach.

A Cape May County man was among dozens arrested in Washington, D.C. Leonard Guthrie, of Lower Township, was charged with unlawful entry.

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Lehigh to Trump: You’re no longer ‘honorary’

By DANIEL PATRICK SHEEHAN, THE MORNING CALL

In the wake of Wednesday’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Lehigh University Board of Trustees has rescinded the honorary degree granted to President Donald Trump three decades ago, a move sought by many members of the school community since Trump won the White House.

The school awarded Trump an honorary degree in 1988.

In 2018, faculty voted by a wide margin to urge the Bethlehem school’s trustees to rescind the degree, calling some of Trump’s statements racist, sexist and Islamophobic, and not representative of the school’s values. More than 80 percent of participating faculty voted “yes” on the motion, with a 296-50 vote. More than 75 percent of eligible faculty participated. That request was denied.

A statement from the board said the decision to rescind was made by the executive committee Thursday night and affirmed by the full board today but offered no other details.

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Morning Coffee: Our democracy was pushed to the brink. Pa. Republicans bear responsibility

‘Our vanguard has broken through the barricades,’ former state Rep. Rick Saccone wrote on the day our democracy nearly burned to the ground.

By John L. Micek, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Good Thursday Morning, Fellow Seekers.The madness and treason that’s consumed the Party of Trump now has a face: And it belongs to former Pennsylvania state Rep. Rick Saccone.

On Wednesday, on a day that thugs and domestic terrorists bent on overthrowing the results of a lawful election, stormed the United States Capitol with laughable ease, Saccone, an Allegheny County Republican, who once swore an oath to uphold the law and the constitution, tried to justify the unjustifiable.

“We are storming the Capitol,” Saccone, also a former Congressional candidate who once aspired to serve in the building he proposed to sack, brayed in a now-deleted post. “Our vanguard has broken through the barricades. We will save this nation. Are you with me?”

In a now-deleted video, preserved by Sen. Lindsey Williams, D-Allegheny, Saccone boasts that he and others are “trying to run out all the evil people that are in there, and all the RINOs (Republicans in name only) who have betrayed our president. We’re going to run them out of their offices. We’re calling on Vice President [Mike] Pence to support our president. Look at all these people here … hundreds of thousands. The fake news media won’t tell you how many people are here. But I’m telling you that there are hundreds of thousands of people here to support our president and save our nation.”

We know how that ended: With Capitol Police, their guns drawn, guarding the doors to the U.S. House chamber, as people hid behind desks and chairs, as people tried to break it down. With an angry mob swarming, seemingly unchallenged, through the halls of the Capitol and across its east and west fronts. And with four people dead.

It was a coup. It was insurrection. And it was all based on a lie, incited and perpetrated by President Donald Trump, and propagated by loyal flunkies across every level of government, that the results of a free and fair election — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — was somehow riddled with widespread fraud.

It reached its hideous conclusion Wednesday, as Trump exhorted his followers to march on the Capitol.

So thus did Saccone, and his fellow pro-Trump extremists, descend on the Capitol on Wednesday to try to up-end the quadrennial counting of electoral votes already riven by controversy, thanks to the cynical and careerist fever dreams of Trump loyalists in the U.S. House and Senate who decided they’d object to the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

As the Capital-Star has reported previously, eight of Pennsylvania’s nine Republican U.S. House lawmakers went into Wednesday’s count planning to object to the certification of the results.

And they were doing it, as U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-10th District, outlined in a Tweet, at the behest of home state Republican pols, who were at least honest enough to admit that they couldn’t short-circuit Biden’s Keystone State victory on their own.

“When Members of our PA General Assembly have concerns, it’s my DUTY to have concerns, too,” Perry wrote on Wednesday. “The PA Senate has asked Congress to DELAY cert of EC to allow for due process in pursuit of election integrity in a key case before SCOTUS — I’m obliged to concur.”

Which, of course, is just nonsense.

Perry was under no such obligation — other than sheer partisanship and a misguided loyalty to a tinpot tyrant — to do any such thing.

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The U.S. Energy Storage Boom Has Arrived

Battery storage has entered a new phase of rapid growth, brought on by falling prices for lithium-ion batteries and rising demand for electricity sources that can fill in the gaps in a grid that is increasingly fueled by wind and solar.

By Dan Gearino, Inside Clean Energy

Just five years ago, a 20 megawatt battery storage project was considered big.

Now a 300 megawatt project, the largest in the world, has gone online in California, and even bigger battery projects are coming in 2021.

Battery storage has entered a new phase of rapid growth, brought on by falling prices for lithium-ion batteries and rising demand for electricity sources that can fill in the gaps in a grid that is increasingly fueled by wind and solar. High demand is leading to a boom in investment in battery companies, and fevered speculation about new kinds of batteries.

Battery storage is a crucial part of the transition to clean energy because of the way it can store power from intermittent sources for use at other times, providing a cleaner and less expensive alternative to natural gas power plants.

And 2021 is shaping up to be the year in which battery storage takes a big step toward being an essential part of the grid, rather than operating at the edges.

To help make sense of it, I reached out to Eric Gimon, a policy adviser for the think tank Energy Innovation.

“I feel like we have crossed a threshold,” he said, about the completion of a new wave of big battery projects. “That’s important, a signpost that we’re moving into a new era.”

We are living, he said, in a period when batteries “have arrived.”

To understand the size of the new battery storage projects, it helps to grasp the two key measures: megawatts, which show how much power a battery storage system can produce at one moment, and megawatt-hours, which indicate a battery’s duration by showing how many units of electricity a system can produce before needing to be recharged.

Here are the two largest battery storage projects:

Vistra Moss Landing Energy Storage in Moss Landing, California, went online last month with capacity of 300 megawatts, making it the largest battery storage system in the world. The system runs for four hours and produces up to 1,200 megawatt-hours before needing to be recharged. A second phase of 100 megawatts is under construction and will likely be complete in August, according to the developer, Vistra Energy.

Manatee Energy Storage Center near Parrish, Florida, will have capacity of 409 megawatts, which will be the largest capacity of any facility now under construction. The system has a duration of slightly more than two hours, producing up to 900 megawatt-hours on single charge. The developer, NextEra Energy, says the project is on track to go online near the end of 2021. So Manatee is the largest in terms of megawatts of capacity, while Vistra Moss Landing is the largest in terms of the amount of electricity it can generate before a recharge. The differences come down to design choices made by the developers, which are based on the size and duration that the local grid needs, among many other considerations.

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Gimon said grid operators and regulators are still getting used to the growing presence of battery storage and figuring out how this rapid change will affect electricity prices and the way that various power producers work together.

They are going to need to work quickly, considering the pace of growth. The U.S. has gone from 0.3 gigawatts (0.7 gigawatt-hours) of new battery storage in 2019, to 1.1 gigawatts (3 gigawatt-hours) in 2020, and a projected 2.4 gigawatts (7.6 gigawatt-hours) in 2021, according to BloombergNEF.

Rapid growth in battery storage is leading to innovation. Companies are working to find more efficient ways to build lithium-ion battery systems, and are working to develop batteries that use different materials. The results may be useful across a battery economy that includes energy storage and electric vehicles.

As the industry develops, many entrepreneurs are stepping into this space.

Eos Energy Services of New Jersey is attracting attention from investors with a battery that uses a zinc-based design instead of lithium-ion. The company says its battery has the advantage of using widely available components, as opposed to lithium-ion, whose components, like lithium and cobalt, are limited or may become limited. Eon also emphasizes the safety of its batteries in contrast to the flammability of lithium-ion. The company this week announced that it had received a $20 million order from a customer, the largest in the company’s history.

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NJ man from Cape May among those arrested for Capitol Hill riot

Protesters gathered in the nation’s capital Wednesday to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

By Kimberlee Bongard, Patch Staff

CAPE MAY, NJ — A South Jersey man is among the protesters who have been arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, according to police records.

Leonard Guthrie, of Cape May, is charged with unlawful entry, the U.S. Capitol police said in a press statement Thursday. Authorities did not release his age.

The Capitol police reported 10 arrests for unlawful entry, and four people charged with assaulting police or firearms charges.

Wednesday’s mayhem overwhelmed Capitol Police, who evacuated members of Congress as violence escalated, and a California woman was shot to death. Three other deaths were reported around the Capitol grounds. D.C.’s police chief said one woman and two men suffered fatal medical emergencies, but did not elaborate.

On Thursday, the FBI asked for tips and digital media from the rioting and violence that can to lead agents to the D.C. rioters. The agency said anyone who saw unlawful violent actions is asked to submit their information, photos or videos at fbi.gov/USCapitol. Witnesses also can call -800-CALL-FBI (1-‪800-225-5324) to report tips.

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