Public Service Electric & Gas has tentatively agreed to a sharply scaled-down plan to make its gas and power grids more resilient, accepting a $842 million, four-year program instead of a $2.5 billion, five-year spending program.
In a separate proposed agreement with stakeholders, the state’s largest utility also agreed to put off a decision on its $2.8 billion energy-efficiency filing until early 2020, one of the company’s biggest priorities. Instead, PSE&G will spend $42 million on existing programs aimed at cutting energy use by hospitals and multi-family housing, and installing smart thermostats.
Both agreements need to be finalized among stakeholders — the utility itself, staff of the Board of Public Utilities, and the New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel. The proposed settlements could be up for approval by the BPU at its initial September meeting.
The accords reached with regulators signal worries among regulators about spikes in customers’ bills resulting from the Murphy administration’s clean-energy goals, and its efforts to decrease power outages may be starting to resonate even though those policies already enjoy wide backing from the public and government officials.
The tentative agreements come in the wake of the administration approving a controversial $300 million subsidy to keep open three power plants operated by PSEG Power, an affiliate of the utility, this past April. Last month, the BPU also approved ratepayer subsidies to build 1,100 megawatts of offshore-wind capacity off Atlantic City, a project expected to cost $1.68 billion.
Energy Solutions Inc. announced it signed a term sheet with FirstEnergy to acquire and transfer Unit-2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station located near Middletown, Pa.
To perform decommissioning work, EnergySolutions and Jingoli, a construction company headquartered in Lawrenceville, NJ, formed a joint venture called ES/Jingoli Decommissioning LLC.
Mile Island’s Unit-2 has been in a safe and stable storage condition known as Post Defueling Monitored Storage for the last 30 years under the regulatory oversight of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Its nuclear fuel was removed in the 1980s after a pump failure in March of 1979 triggered an emergency shutdown that resulted in a partial meltdown and a radiation leak. It remains the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. Unit-2 was then relocated to an offsite storage facility at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The remaining decommissioning work will result in complete dismantlement and removal of all nuclear waste.
Jingoli says it has successfully managed and executed nuclear projects on behalf of numerous utilities in the United States and Canada with experience in the nuclear field from pre-construction, construction management, project controls and decommissioning.
With the term sheet signed, EnergySolutions and FirstEnergy will proceed with definitive agreements and applications to the NRC for the transfer of all licenses and assets.
A sea turtle that was hospitalized and rehabilitated at the Turtle Back Zoo was released at Point Pleasant Beach Tuesday morning.
The turtle, a 5-year-old Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, became stranded after coming to New Jersey from Cape Cod in November 2018. Sea Turtle Recovery says this is the 41st turtle it has rehabilitated and released since opening two and a half years ago.
Bill Deerr of Sea Turtle Recovery says this species of sea turtle is critically endangered, so it’s important to release them to hopefully increase their population. He says this turtle was their sickest turtle this year.
Cargill buys large quantities of soy from local farmers in the Cerrado, a vast Brazilian savanna. Photo credit Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For years, the American agricultural giant Cargill has been on relatively good terms with environmental advocates, praised for agreeing to a landmark moratorium on buying soybeans grown on deforested land in the Amazon rain forest.
In recent weeks, though, that relationship has soured over the company’s refusal to agree to a similar moratorium in another environmentally sensitive region of Brazil and, more broadly, over its failure to meet its anti-deforestation targets. This month, the environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth released a report titled “Cargill: The Worst Company in the World.”
The fierce reaction shows how corporations that fall short of ambitious environmental commitments can be received. And it demonstrates the speed with which a company can go from environmental leader to scourge in the eyes of some advocates.
“What was disappointing was that Cargill got lauded and then didn’t follow through,” said Nathalie Walker, a director at the National Wildlife Federation. “I don’t think anyone is taking a personal view or an emotional view about a company. It’s judging them by their actions.”
Cargill, which acts as a middleman between farms and big food companies, is one of the top exporters of Brazilian soy. Before it committed to the soy moratorium in 2006, advocacy organizations like Greenpeace had pressured the company to stop working with farmers who cleared native vegetation in the Amazon, where rampant deforestation was creating an environmental catastrophe. Eventually, Cargill agreed to the moratorium — a move that environmental groups say has helped significantly reduce deforestation in the region.
The largest privately-owned company in the United States, Cargill has never exactly been the darling of the environmental community. But over the years, advocacy groups, often pugnacious in their criticism of powerful corporations, have occasionally lauded the company for its promises to do better. Cargill even received a Leadership in Environment Award for its role in the Amazon moratorium from the Keystone Policy Center, a nonprofit focused on compromise and civil dialogue.
Recently, however, the goodwill seems to have evaporated. Last month, Greenpeace questioned the company’s commitment to ending deforestation in Brazil, shortly before Mighty Earth released its scathing 7,000-word condemnation of Cargill, which criticized the company for pollution and meat contamination, as well as deforestation.
“It’s hard to hear,” said Ruth Kimmelshue, Cargill’s chief sustainability officer. “It doesn’t feel very good.”
Much of the recent criticism of Cargill is focused on the continuing deforestation in the Cerrado, a vast Brazilian savanna where the company buys large quantities of soy from local farmers. The Cerrado accounts for around 60 percent of Brazil’s total soy production, roughly 20 times the amount grown in the Amazon.
Joe and Diane Fondie, above, talked with their granddaughter, illuminated by a single light fixture, at their part-time home in Skibo, Minn., a village with no electric service. Anthony Souffle photo.
SKIBO, Minn. – Television time is restricted in David Fondie’s house. Surfing the internet has time limits, too.
That’s because the remote Iron Range hamlet where he lives has no electricity — at least not the conventional kind. Fondie must fire up a generator to produce his own power, as does everybody in Skibo. The town is not connected to the grid.
“My son is in college and he tries to explain to his buddies why we don’t have power,” said Fondie, who lives in Skibo with his wife and daughter. “ ‘How can that be?’ is their reaction. The lines just don’t go that far.”
Skibo, tucked into the Superior National Forest, is home to at least 20 residents, though all but four are seasonal, said Joe Fondie, David’s dad and a sort of de facto mayor of the unincorporated town, which is in the service territory of Lake Country Power.
Cooperatives such as Grand Rapids-based Lake Country brought electricity to the American countryside beginning in the 1930s, stringing wires to sparsely populated places where for-profit utilities feared to tread.
But while data on the topic is hard to find, Lake Country CEO Greg Randa said there are still several rural nooks in Minnesota like Skibo that were never connected.
Laundry dries on a line to preserve energy at Joe and Diane Fondie’s part-time home in Skibo, Minn. Anthony Souffle photo
We serve a lot of little crossroad junctions,” said Randa.
Lake Country is owned by its 43,000 customers spread over eight counties. But Skibo was always too far and too small to economically justify electric service from Lake Country and its predecessor co-op.
It would cost at least $1 million to string the 16-mile power line needed to serve Skibo, Randa said. “We wouldn’t ask for [Skibo residents] to pay for it all, but we have to make sure existing members don’t subsidize it.”
Railroad beginnings
The Fondies hoped that a recent Canadian National Railway project near Skibo — which required a grid hookup — would finally bring them full-time power.
“We thought it was a foregone conclusion we’d get connected,” said Joe Fondie.
Yet while an underground power cable now snakes along the rail tracks right through Skibo, it is Canadian National’s private electrical network.
Skibo owes its existence to the old Duluth and Iron Range Railroad, created in the late 1800s to serve Minnesota’s then-nascent iron mining industry. The town was named for Skibo Castle in Scotland, an ancient estate bought by Andrew Carnegie after the Scotsman became king of the American steel industry.
In Carnegie’s day, railway workers in Skibo did nearby track maintenance. Steam engines stopped for water. Passengers came and went at Skibo’s little rail station. The town, for a time, even had a post office, a small school and a sawmill. That’s all long gone.
But the railroad is still busy. Six to eight trains brimming with taconite pellets barrel through Skibo each day on their way to Two Harbors. Joe Fondie gets a panoramic view of them through his kitchen window.
Canadian National decided that connecting with Lake Country in Skibo was too expensive. Part of its operations, though, are in another utility’s territory, so the railroad effectively ran a miles-long extension cord down its tracks.
Skibo residents don’t have the same option, both because of the money it would take and the fact that none of the village falls outside Lake Country’s service territory.
Powering up
A native of nearby Aurora, Fondie, 73, started building his compound in Skibo in 1980 and moved there full-time in 1993 with his wife, Diane. They have a 4,000-square-foot home — its interior lushly paneled in pine and spruce — and several outbuildings.
The Fondies worked around the power problem. While Joe was employed as a financial controller at several companies, he’s also a tinkerer with electrical know-how, once owning an Aurora company that made electronic parts.
At first, Fondie tried to illuminate his Skibo home with gas lights (powered by propane). That lasted until gas leaked and a cabinet caught fire. Now, he has a 12,000-watt diesel generator and bank of 84 industrial-grade lead-acid batteries.
It cost Fondie nearly $5,000 a year to fuel the generator, so he invested about $6,000 in a 15-panel solar array. Sun power cut his diesel fuel bill to less than $1,000.
But the system has its limits. The clothes washer is run only on sunny days. The refrigerator, another power-sucker, operates on propane — an inferior technology, the Fondies said. Joe has a big mechanical shop, but his electricity often comes up short for welding.
“And if the power goes out, we have to fix it,” said Diane Fondie.
Joe and Diane have the Rolls-Royce power system in town. Most electrical setups are more like David Fondie’s.
He’s got a 3,000-watt gasoline-powered generator and four backups; generators go out a lot and they’re particularly finicky in winter, said David, who works at a taconite plant in Silver Bay. He has two marine batteries, which are used to run his water pump and to charge cellphones (plus a booster to even get phone service). Otherwise, the electricity is on only when the generator is running.
“We are running it for lights and TV and a heat bulb for the chickens,” said David, referring to his henhouse.
The Trump administration had been working on a plan to drastically weaken Obama-era rules on planet-warming vehicle pollution. Photo,, Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times
Four of the world’s largest automakers, including the Ford Motor Company, have struck a deal with California to reduce tailpipe pollution.
In coming weeks, the Trump administration is expected to all but eliminate an Obama-era regulation designed to reduce vehicle emissions that contribute to global warming. California and 13 other states have vowed to keep enforcing the stricter rules, potentially splitting the United States auto market in two.
With car companies facing the prospect of having to build two separate lineups of vehicles, they opened secretive talks with California regulators in which the automakers — Ford Motor Company, Volkswagen of America, Honda and BMW — won rules that are slightly less restrictive than the Obama standards and that they can apply to vehicles sold nationwide.
The agreement provides “much-needed regulatory certainty,” the companies said in a joint statement while enabling them to “meet both federal and state requirements with a single national fleet, avoiding a patchwork of regulations.”
Under the agreement, the four automakers, which together make up about 30 percent of the United States auto market, would face slightly looser standard than the original Obama rule: Instead of reaching an average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, they would be required to hit about 51 miles per gallon by 2026.
The Trump administration has said it plans to roll back the Obama-era standard to about 37 miles per gallon.
Increasing fuel efficiency means vehicles burn less gas and subsequently emit less greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere.
Although California won the backing of the four companies in its showdown with the federal government, the Trump administration is still expected to try to revoke California’s right to set its own auto emissions standards. The state has vowed to fight that effort all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, and the four automakers, by siding with California, are in effect voting that they expect California to win that battle.
On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said he was “very confident” that more automakers would join the deal in coming days, and one auto executive familiar with the negotiations agreed that was likely.
